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Computer disaster - anyone have any ideas?


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22 minutes ago, DC Tom said:

 

You're also the guy that would exclaim "!@#$!  How is this piece of wood too short!"  ?

 

 

That actually happened the other night as I was installing some pergo. Needless to say, I hurled all kinds of expletives at myself.

 

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2 minutes ago, joesixpack said:

 

That actually happened the other night as I was installing some pergo. Needless to say, I hurled all kinds of expletives at myself.

 

 

You should have hired someone to do that.

 

Hurl expletives at you, that is.  I charge reasonable rates, !@#$head.

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11 hours ago, Gray Beard said:

My wife buys two-disk external RAIDs all set up for her as a standard catalog item (Newegg, I think).  If she doesn’t want to take it with her or have it hooked up, she will backup her stuff in the evening. She also uses cloud storage. A belt-and-suspenders mentality.  She had a bad experience once and now she will only trust RAIDs.

 

If you go the external route be sure to encrypt the drives in case they walk away

 

11 hours ago, WhoTom said:

 

I agree with all of that. In addition, keep doing backups. Mirrored drives don't protect your data from viruses or OS issues.

 

 

11 hours ago, joesixpack said:

My company does data recovery, if the drive is physically capable. Where are you located?


Edit: and while /dev/null is correct in his assessment, there's a number of cloud-based backup systems you can use as well to have complete surety.

 

 

And yes, also stick with the offsite backups. 

Obviously you want to do backups in case of critical data loss. 

But you also want the backups stored offsite in case of a physical disaster (fire, flood, theft, etc).  Either stick with a cloud based solution or implement a local solution and take the backups (encrypted of course) to a secure offsite location for storage

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3 hours ago, row_33 said:

one old accountant i had to work for forgot his laptop at a cottage and a hotel over 3 years, had to re-input schedules and stuff for weeks on end...

 

 

 

A company I used to work at, we had sold a new server and backup tape system to a small business. The server failed and when they went to restore the data from the tapes, discovered my coworker that did the install never setup the auto backup to run. So guess who got to sit in that office for two days and reinput their sales from the past year?

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19 hours ago, /dev/null said:

There are commercial recovery companies that may be able to recover your data.  They are not cheap.

 

That said, what you described above sounds like the drive has failed physically.  If your critical data is on a bad sector you are SoL

 

Two questions, actually one question and an admonition. 

 

First, and if you go cross eyed reading it, the answer is probably no.  Is the hard drive encrypted?  If your IT guy or Best Buy connected it via USB or as a secondary drive in another system without the encryption software to read it, the other computer will not recognize the file system. 

 

Second, if you kept getting BSoD why didn't you back up your stuff when you still had a chance?

 

My suggestion moving forward is to buy three new hard drives.  Two large drives of the same capacity and a smaller drive for the operating system.  Re-install your OS on the smaller drive.  Add the two large drives of the same capacity and create a mirrored partition.  This will cut the available space in half, for example if you buy two 2TB drives a mirror will result in a single 2TB partition.  But all data written to the mirrored partition is written to both drives.  If one drive in the mirror fails the other will keep running and you won't lose your data. 

 

The hard drive is now at who you suggest in your first paragraph, and we're hoping your 2nd paragraph doesn't turn out to be the case.

 

I'm going to ask him about the encryption thing.

 

I thought the backup was working!

 

Your last paragraph is a great suggestion. 

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Just become a hoarder... Throw your data all over the place, like leaving bread crumbs.

 

When in doubt... Stash it. Like going to the gun range, firepower trumps accuracy.

 

Like mead said, print it too.  I am never having a "digital disaster" again... LoL...

 

 

[BTW... You never took my advice before, please don't start a new trend and take it now]

 

Best of luck... We are all counting on you!

 

?

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On 7/20/2018 at 2:16 AM, bbb said:

I stupidly had all the spreadsheets I need for my business on an old computer, and ...

you could always make some sort of terroristic threat and have the FBI do their forensic analysis to dig 'em up for ya.

 

 

On 7/20/2018 at 12:02 PM, joesixpack said:

 

I'm the guy that will sit there and stare at the screen and/or documentation for 30 minutes before being 100% assured that to press a button is the right thing. I'm also the guy who measures a piece of wood to be cut 10 times before cutting. Because the LAST thing you wanna be is the OTHER guy.

 

they're kind of expensive and i have lost mine but you could always get a board stretcher for those occassions when you ARE the other guy.

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On 7/20/2018 at 11:02 AM, joesixpack said:

 

I'm the guy that will sit there and stare at the screen and/or documentation for 30 minutes before being 100% assured that to press a button is the right thing. I'm also the guy who measures a piece of wood to be cut 10 times before cutting. Because the LAST thing you wanna be is the OTHER guy.

 

How the hell did I miss this?

 

I like your style.  You must get a lot done, quickly! ?

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21 hours ago, stuvian said:

see if your security/antivirus software package includes back up. Some do

 

would any employees have e-mailed the spreadsheets through gmail by chance?

 

I don't think it did.

 

The good news is that a data retrieval expert got to the data................I still want to see it when I have it tomorrow, but it seems that he has pulled it off! 

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2 hours ago, bbb said:

 

I don't think it did.

 

The good news is that a data retrieval expert got to the data................I still want to see it when I have it tomorrow, but it seems that he has pulled it off! 

 

Let this be a lesson to you all that this organ-i-zation will not tolerate failure

 

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a real answer before you go the expensive data recovery option.

 

stick the hard drive in sealed bag, then the freezer for a bit, then pull it out, stick it in the computer and try to boot it up. if it boots, immediately make a copy of the Excel file. and anything else.

 

N.B.: you could make the situation worse. However, I have seen this work before. And it will only work on older hard drives (think 5+ years).

 

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/112050/recovering-data-from-a-damaged-hard-drive-the-freezer-trick

 

 

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