Always back up your data

I will admit it. Like many of the IT folks I know, while I am heavily involved in disaster recovery planning and processes at the office, things like backups tend to slip my fragile little mind when it comes to the home. Just last week, I was telling myself "You may want to back up the photos on the media server downstairs, what with you not having done that since May or some such." As I had something more important to do than to sit there and burn hundreds of images over to some manner of optical media, I never got around to it.

Today, my wife asked me to print off a few recent pictures of the children so that she could have something for her desk. I grab ye olde handy laptop and browse over to the media server... Not found. I know the server's up, as this also provides my DNS, DHCP, FTP, and other handy services around the house, so I browse to the admin share on that drive. Not found.

"Goodness," I think to myself before opening a terminal services session on the server. "This can't be good."

My computer shows me an E: drive. [click] The drive in e: is not formatted. Format it now?

Oh, shit.

Maybe it's the controller, so I take it to another box upstairs. Same results (replace "shit" with a more vile epithet).

Now I've got to go into DR mode. I did some digging around the house to find that I still have all of the files from before May 2007 and the JPG versions of all the images I shot whilst in Bulgaria on vacation back in June/July. Does bugger all for the Christmas snaps, that one.

I found "Zero Assumptions Recovery" online and gave it a go. It managed to find all the data on the drive for me, at significantly less cost than sending out to a company which does such work ($30). Some of the images are hosed up, but the vast majority were recovered off to a different disk. It provided me the opportunity to move the data elsewhere such that I could actually get around to burning it to CD.

I strongly recommend both the "back up regularly" strategy that I failed on, and the Zero Assumptions Recovery tool. It's saved me from much spousal aggravation.