So, a couple points of reference (technology oriented) (hopefully helpful)

All of us like to be prepared, we carry what we need with us on a daily basis, right? Many of us have all manner of gadgets and things we might need in a given day. So, here was a bit of a surprise for me the other day (yesterday).

In addition to the normal compliment of EDC stuff, I also carry some electronics. One of the things I carry is a (solid state portable HD, or SSD). The one I have is a Toshiba 500mb drive. Now this is kind of a long story, but I back a lot of stuff up to this drive. I'll keep it (the story) short. At home I have a 1TB IOmega drive I back my laptop files up to, and I use my SDD as a secondary backup "sometimes". However, at work our backup has all manner of legal strings attached to it, so it's unreliable at best. For the critical stuff, I back it up to my SSD also (but nowhere else).

Sunday night I needed to retrieve something off my backup drive at home. In the process I noticed my laptop was really struggling (my laptop is a barn burner, fast...so that was unusual). I narrowed the problem down to my SSD (i.e. when I unplugged it my laptop came right back to being a rocket). I thought nothing more of it, and put the SSD in my bag (my EDC bag).

Well, on Tuesday I received a request for some documents (some old documents), and I immediately went to my SSD. I was shocked to find EVERYTHING on my SSD backup had been deleted...and the drive had reformatted itself (completely)!!!! OH...MY...GAWD!!!

There was 308 GB (not Megabytes, but GIGabytes) of data on that drive and it was all lost...GONE!! Now, I work in technologies so I didn't panic at first, and I got a recovery program to examine the drive. Yep, sure enough...everything was deleted and the drive had been reformatted. This drive had served me well for two years and I thought it was bulletproof, but all of a sudden it had reversed itself to the very basic files it had on it when I bought it...and nothing else!

Now it was time to break out the BIG guns in the data world. I had some fairly advanced software which would analyze a HD and see what was recoverable. The software showed 308 GIGS of data as "lost"!!! (there were numerous other categories of data, but "lost" was the worst). Fortunately for me, this software is designed to deal with exactly this problem...so I set it up to start recovering "lost" data.

My first problem was my work PC only had about 350 GB of storage remaining on the drive. The software needs a swap file space about 3x the size of the data it is recovering, so I was trying to recover 300GB and needed 900GB of room to do it. I didn't have it on my desktop. Thankfully I didn't try to recover the data on the same drive that lost it, because the swapfile size would have overwritten data it was trying to recover. So I had a problem!

I ran out to the local office supply place and picked up a 2 TB drive (turned out they were closing so I got a smoking deal on a Western Digital 2TB drive...for $59 bucks!). Now I had some serious real estate to recover the data. It took nearly three (3) hours to recover it all (and I got about 95-99% of it), and at one point I checked the new drive and over 1TB was in use (like 1.34TB).

So, what's the moral of the story? I usually have several evolutions of backups on various media, but I learned something (I should have known already). Even if you have (5) backups of a drive on something, unless you have those backups on two different sets of media, then you can be SKREWED very fast! Had I backed up my SSD to my iOmega drive I would have been fine, but I didn't have an identical copy elsewhere, and all my work files were on the SSD.

It was hours and hours of stress, unnecessary stress, and lots of rolaids. So, the wisdom is...back it up in more than one physical place.

Hope this helps! (and I also hope someone got a kick out of my folly and hardship).

To put things in perspective...on this drive was...

45 GB of email
6,500 pictures
500 movies and mpeg4 files
150 GB of .pdf drawing files
...among other things.

It was just crazy how much data was on this drive! And it was just crazy how stoopid I was to trust that. It was totally my fault, and I paid the price. Fortunately, for me, I had the tools to recover most of it, but many don't.

Don't make the same mistake I did.

(-----dumb bunny!

dp

There is the possibility that your original SSD drive had a vulnerability on it to begin with... kind of like a zero day exploit. Our company will no longer allow USB drives to autoload on the computer because the autoload script might load a .exe which will run. There might have been one of those on that drive which may have caused your issues.

So yeah, that sucks. Since this is ATS, it could be the people that own the cloud trying to force you to purchase their services

Glad you could recover most of the data you needed.

Anybody else have any thoughts on FCD's issue?

There is the possibility that your original SSD drive had a vulnerability on it to begin with... kind of like a zero day exploit. Our company will no longer allow USB drives to autoload on the computer because the autoload script might load a .exe which will run. There might have been one of those on that drive which may have caused your issues.

So yeah, that sucks. Since this is ATS, it could be the people that own the cloud trying to force you to purchase their services

Glad you could recover most of the data you needed.

Anybody else have any thoughts on FCD's issue?

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
I'm glad you got most of your stuff back. That must have been gut wrenching.

After reading this I'm going to dig out my external hard drive and back my stuff up. I kept putting it off but you just got me thinking of it. The last thing I want to do is lose it all.