F*ing Hard Disk Crashed

[Natdavis777]

Woke up at 0530 yesterday to get my brew started. Got the burner fired up and had my strike water heating up. Came inside and grabbed my computer to find out what my mash mineral additions were and....I was greeted with a Utility screen. Basically had to reinstall the OS and lost everything.

Thank God for the iCloud I still have all my photos, but all my beer recipes, notes, etc in Beer Alchemy are vanished... Needless to say I am pissed. I think this is a prime opportunity to back this data up on a flash drive

 

[Picker]

Bummer.
I've heard that here are 2 kinds of computer users. Those that have lost data...and those that are about to.

 

[UncleRusty]

Well that's no good, but it does illustrate the need to always keep a backup copy of anything that's important. I like to keep copies of all my brewing notes and recipes in Google Drive for redundancy.

 

[brew_ny]

that is why we say " hardware is change in your pocket, data is priceless"

I feel your pain

S_M

 

[sfrisby]

A couple months ago I simultaneously lost my hard drive AND my backup drive.

The tech said in his best expert opinion, it was a freak coincidence.

What? How? Lightning?

No. Old age.

Come on....

 

[Natdavis777]

Well what really erks me is that I have a Macbook Pro, and its only 3 years old...Now I preface that with the fact that my last laptop, also a mac, lasted me 7 years with no issues. The only reason I got a new laptop was the fact that Apple didnt support my OS anymore, so all new programs were not supported. I gave it to my brother and he ended up using it for a few more years.

That was my computer I used for college, it was carried around a bunch, dropped, etc. This computer sits on the table closed and in standby for the majority of the day, so this was something I completely wasnt expecting.

On a good note though, I downloaded the 2.0 version of Beer Alchemy, and so far, I like it better that the older version

 

[guitarguy6]

There are so many free online backup options. You could save all your recipes and such on skydrive, dropbox, gmail etc It's not if a hard drive is going to fail it's when

 

[jimyson]

For this exact reason, I backup to both Time Machine and Crash Plan. In addition, I use cloud services for photos, music, and beer smith recipes!

 

[Natdavis777]

I was luckily able to retrieve all my photos from the cloud... What is ironic is I told my wife a few weeks ago, "just move your photos to the computer to free up some space on your phone" so she did and deleted all her photos, 90% which are of our 14 month old for the past year. She was pissed....

I will look into gmail for backing up my beer recipes. The past few nights I have been working on the recipes I had saved on my phone, redoing my mineral/acid additions thru Bru'n water, etc.

 

[jdauria]

I keep all my Beersmith recipe files on Dropbox just to be safe. Plus it allows me to access files while at work too!

 

[stpug]

...I was greeted with a Utility screen. Basically had to reinstall the OS and lost everything.

Generally, a hard drive crash is synonymous with a failing device (i.e. a failing hard drive) in which case you are NOT best served with reinstalling the OS onto that same device. You are best served by replacing the hard drive and then installing your OS on the new device.

On the other hand, if you were able to install the OS on the "crashed" hard drive then in all likelihood your data was still salvageable. Unfortunately, it's too late to do anything about that now.

For future reference, if a hard drive fails then you should remove the device from the system ASAP and replace it with a new one. After you've got a new OS installed on the new device then you can find help from someone to salvage your old data on the old device.

 

[passedpawn]

Generally, a hard drive crash is synonymous with a failing device (i.e. a failing hard drive) in which case you are NOT best served with reinstalling the OS onto that same device. You are best served by replacing the hard drive and then installing your OS on the new device.

On the other hand, if you were able to install the OS on the "crashed" hard drive then in all likelihood your data was still salvageable. Unfortunately, it's too late to do anything about that now.

For future reference, if a hard drive fails then you should remove the device from the system ASAP and replace it with a new one. After you've got a new OS installed on the new device then you can find help from someone to salvage your old data on the old device.

Exactamundo.

 

[jcoxen]

I recommend SpinRite to recover your old hard drive and CrashPlan to backup all your data.

SpinRite takes a while to run but if your drive is recoverable, it'll recover it.

CrashPlan is more expensive that some of the alternative cloud backup services but it's unlimited space. I use it to backup my media server which contains all my photos, music and my DVD collection (650 and counting). That totals to more than 2.5 Terabytes. It took a while to backup but it's safe now no matter what happens...short of someone pulling the BIG plug in which case I more important things to drink/think about.

 

[Natdavis777]

Generally, a hard drive crash is synonymous with a failing device (i.e. a failing hard drive) in which case you are NOT best served with reinstalling the OS onto that same device. You are best served by replacing the hard drive and then installing your OS on the new device.

On the other hand, if you were able to install the OS on the "crashed" hard drive then in all likelihood your data was still salvageable. Unfortunately, it's too late to do anything about that now.

For future reference, if a hard drive fails then you should remove the device from the system ASAP and replace it with a new one. After you've got a new OS installed on the new device then you can find help from someone to salvage your old data on the old device.

Duly noted...

If and when this happens again, I will just invest in a new disc. Hopefully that isnt for awhile though. I did get a second cloud to store my recipes though. Those and the picures (backed up on iCloud) are really the only things I care about.

Thanks for the input