Page 1 of What have you lost in an unexpected HDD crash?

Just wondering whether anyone has lost something they consider practically irreplaceable when their `puter has crashed and they haven`t backed up as much as they should have done. I`ve been quite lucky in the past week, as the hard drive gave me a warning so I managed to get all the digital pics I`ve ever taken (and quite a few important documents) onto approx 135 floppy disks (the disk was in such a bad state that the CD Rom caching didnt work) and so things were not as bad as I first thought....but I`ve also had too much to drink while setting up the new hard drive and reinstalling everything I think I remember I had once....if you see what I mean. I`d have put all this in the `is anyone else up at 2 am` thread...but couldn`t be arsed to look for it :-).

My collection

How ironic since my laptop died only yesterday! This time (yes, it has happened more then once) I lost very little but with a previous computer I had a fatal error on the HDD and I could get absolutely nothing back. I lost loads of essays, photos and music. Not that I really learnt my lesson in backing things up but I do tend to not store as much stuff on computers as I used too! Annoying things that they are...>:(

A couple of years back i lost half my undergraduate dissertation in a crash. I had backed it up onto a floppy disk, but for some reason had password protected it, and to this day i have no idea what the password was. In the end i had to retype from a hard copy which i had.

yer, lost loads of pics and documents for my dads business!! annoying but it happens. i`ve learned from it though. ive split my hard drive into 2. on for progs and one for docs.

I think I lost a lot of junk I`d downloaded from the net and not done anything with, and a bit of porn, thats about it really. Always been lucky enough to hear the tell tale clicks and get everything off in time.

Editor
DVD REVIEWER

Sercs, that wont help you in a hardware failure. It will only help if you need to reformat the windows partition. You`ll still need backups to protect from a hardware fault.

Personally , I lost all my christmas photos from 2 years ago. Hadnt got round to backing them up to CD and did a rebuild on my machine forgetting I had erased the camera card too.

Years ago, before Word and Windows etc., I used to work in a commercial insurance brokers. My desk was joined to that of a particularly pretty girl called Gaynor.

One day, I sat there chatting to her as she tapped away at her keyboard, putting the finishing touches to a long risk assessment report for a potential new client. Being a bit of a fidget, I was kicking my feet about under the desk; predictably, I kicked the plug for Gaynor`s VDU loose, crashing her machine and destroying the entire document, which she had been working on for nearly a week. I always got on well with Gaynor, and she was going out with a good friend to boot, but that little accident really put a dent in our friendly relations.

I lost my list of Passwords when my laptop died in the summer, and my old freeserve email account had been closed so couldn`t get them emailed to me, hence having to re-join here.

There must be something going on as have just got in from looking at the 3rd faulty computer this week and all have gone down with HDD faults.

Coincidence or conspiracy?

BTW Dabs have a 20gb Seagate for 30 something and a 40Gb can`t remember what make for 40 something. Pretty reasonable. Have ordered 3 of the 40gb`s and flogged them all CD burners for next time, Dabsvalue 52x32x52 less than £25 can`t go wrong with that can you.

All the best

Ger.

Read my older posts as Gerald here