Last week I lost my hard drive in my laptop. The everyday laptop that I use for almost everything. It was about 1 month old (new dell D820 laptop). The drive in the laptop is nice a 7200 RPM (SATA) drive, but have seen some failures (Dell forums). The drive completely died, no data recovery.
The ironic part of this hard drive crash is the fact that I had started my backups (Microsoft synctoy) the day that the drive failed. It was going to take too long for the backup 4 hrs, and I had to make it to a meeting. So there is no one to blame but me for my loss of data.
I did recover data from other backup sources that I use but lost a lot, because of my poor backup process. Some files I just never added to the backup procedure.
For those of you who have had this happen before you probably understand the hardship I am going through. If you have not lost a drive or data you are lucky.
Here are a few of the tools that I use and made this issue not so bad.
1. Mozy.com – they give you 2 gig online backup for free.
2. idrive.com – 2 gig online bacukp.
Both of the above products can be scheduled and run in the background.