The Misery of Hard Drive Failure

Working at home is great fun and it's a wonderful feeling to be in charge of everything that happens in your business. But there's one thing that will pull the rug out from under your feet in no time at all. Hard drive failure. When you worked in an office, the IT manager used to take care of that sort of thing. Now it's up to you. What does it feel like when your Hard Drive fails? You've never had it happen to you? You're lucky. It feels like the bottom has dropped out of your world. You switch on your PC for another fun packed day of interacting with the rest of the world and ...Nothing. Just a simple stark, almost mocking "It has not been possible to start Windows". You switch off and start again. Same message. It suggests you try 'Safe mode', whatever that is. You try safe mode and every other mode it suggests. Same message. Now it starts. A helpless, hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach, and everything that you need to run your busy life has simply drained away. All the emails you've ever sent or received, every letter you've written in the past five years, your CV, the addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of everyone you know--business and personal. All your website favorites with their logging in information. All gone. "Well", you say "it's bad, but it's not the end of the world, most of this stuff can be rebuilt in time". That's true, but I'll tell you what is the end of the world. You've lost all your digital photos. Every picture you've ever taken of the kids, from the day they were born, every birthday party, every holiday, every Christmas, first day at school, meeting Nelson Mandela. All gone. Forever. How does it feel now? You may not be a religious person but you'll be praying by now, I can assure you. Your spouse is going to kill you. They always tell you to back up everything. But hey, modern technology is so reliable these days it hardly seems worth it eh? There must be someone out there who can help. Well there is, but it's going to cost. Hundreds of dollars. Of course, your first inclination is to go to Google and enter data recovery, or something similar. Something ought to come up. Well, yes, it would, if your machine was working. It's no good phoning the bloke up the road who does PC repairs, he doesn't have the specialist equipment and software needed to piece together the gigabytes of stuff on your defunct piece of junk. There's a simple message here: Back everything up. Again: BACK EVERYTHING UP. But what if you haven't? Your best course of action is to pop round to a friend's house and get searching on Google. When you've located a suitable company, don't just make all the arrangements online. Phone them up. You need to talk to a human. Why? Because the prices they charge are usually negotiable. Like every other business out there, these guys face competition. Don't sound desperate over the phone, be calm and in control. You should be able to get at least 30% off the price. When you've got all your data back--and these guys usually take about a week--may I humbly suggest you find an hour in your week to do a regular backup. There's a ton of software out there to make it as painless as possible and you'll never again have to face the prospect of being completely ostracized by an enraged family member.