I just want everybody to learn from my mistakes...
I have had an external drive for about 1.5 years. All my kits (more than I care to mention) were on it, pages I had not printed yet, pages in progress as well as photos. I kept telling myself I was going to burn a copy of everything to disc but kept putting it off. Needless to say my hard drive failed , I sent it to a recovery center. It will cost $1500 to recover the data. They also are not sure if they data CAN be recovered. I blame myself, if I had only
taken the time to burn everything I had. All the money that was spent, memories created-gone.

TAKE THE TIME TO BACK UP YOUR KITS/PAGES AND PHOTOS TO CD/DVD TODAY!!!

Don't make the same mistakes I did.

Patte

I am so sorry to hear that!! It is a hard lesson to learn and one not soon forgotton. I had that happen a few years ago, now I download to my computer then before I put it on my external drive I burn it on DVD/CD's. I burn now on a regular basis. Don't be to hard on yourself, mistakes happen. We learn and go on.

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Paula-

Thanks for your kind words . I just hate making stupid mistakes.
I figure if just 1 person backs up their kits, etc on CD's after reading my message then I can perhaps prevent this from happening to someone else.

well, with the crop this weekend I won't get it done done, but I will start promptly on monday...

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Brenda Kempf
My Gallery

Oh my goodness, I hope they can get it back. I mean, I know the pages are priceless, but wow, that's expensive for priceless!

Thanks for the reminder!

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~Heather W~

Randomness - my blog

Reason I am switching to digital scrapbooking #1: Don't have to clear off my desk to do it!

Please try some of these products first (if you haven't already)... they all have free demos that will tell you if the data can be restored.. if it can, then you can purchase for a fraction of that price.. $1500 is a crime unless they need to move the platters to a new drive because of a huge hardware failure (nothing is wrong with the platters themselves)!!

I've restored data for friends before using these utilities... try them all as sometimes one just doesn't get you all the data. If all these products do not work, then it might be a problem beyond the platters themselves and more hardware related. Good Luck!

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_info.php

Thanks Pesto126 for the links-

I am hoping not to need them in the future. In this instance, I don't think [i] could have used the software because the drive would not even turn on. It even shorted out my consultants computer when trying to trouble shoot it. There was some mention of the platter
I will have to look at my notes. I still have not made a decision on what I am going to do. I can always replace my kits but it is the pictures of my family (Mom,Dad,Brother-all deceased) that were on the drive, I wanted to archive those for my son.


I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to respond.

Have you tried taking the hard drive itself out of the external unit and tried to access it from your PC or another external enclosure? I worked on one for someone who was ready to throw out their EHD and it turned out that it was just a bad pin on the enclosure... as soon as I put it into a new enclosure,,, it worked perfectly!