At 10:48 PM 5/20/05 -0700, Geoff wrote:
>Instead, as a protective measure, back up your data frequently. And,
>should you ever find yourself with a non-functional drive that contains
>data that you absolutely can't live without, find a company that
>specializes in data retrieval. They can retrieve data from almost
>anything. The good ones can probably even retrieve data from a hard drive
>that's been opened. But they're not cheap.
Back in February one of my drive partitions with my accounting data and the
book I've been writing for ten years died on me, with apparently no way to
read it at all. My backup CDs for that partition were also "unreadable" for
some reason. After consulting with a dozen or so "experts" who basically
told me to do better backups, I ran across a program called "Stellar
Phoenix", available in FAT and NTFS versions. Firing up their "shareware"
version downloaded off the net showed me that indeed, there was still data
on the drive. I purchased another hard drive and the program, and let it do
its thing. It recovered about 90% of the data on the drive including saved
pictures, the tracks for songs I've written and my accounting data for the
last two years. The book, a four family genealogy with pictures and
stories, unfortunately didn't survive though I still have a hard copy.
The program cost about $100 for the NTFS version and even though it didn't
find everything, I got almost all of my data back. It might not work in
every instance, but in my case it was worth every penny. The shareware
version will let you know if it will work or not.
Something to consider, anyway.
John Musselwhite, RPT
John Musselwhite, RPT - Calgary, Alberta Canada
http://www.musselwhite.com http://canadianpianopage.com/calgary
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