Brian Stefl Photography

Let me start by saying that I am a backup proponent – bordering on evangelist. I have a RAID 1 (mirrored) hard drive array on my main computer and a RAID 1 array on my external back up drive. I also have been using Carbonite Online Backup. I’ll post about Carbonite later. My main PC has 500G drives in it and was starting to slow down a bit. I checked the drive capacity and realized that the drives were full. I went out and purchased two 1T drives to migrate my data over to. I did a little reading on the RAID array and swapped the drives. As it turned out, I then had 1T drives formatted to 500G drives – that were full!. I put the old drives back in and rebooted. The windows configuration files were corrupt. There have not been many times in my life when every outward bodily function wants to happen at once, but this was one of those times. I knew not to mess around too much with this and started checking what I would be missing from my backups.

My external drive had not been backed up in a couple of months (I was changing backup software) and my carbonite backup still had 5500 files to go. There would be a lot missing. After a recovery call with Dell, the technician suggested I call a recovery specialist. After some searching in google, I went to the member section of the NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) website and found a recovery company called Drivesavers . These folks offered a 15% discount on recovery services. Now, keep in mind this happened on a Sunday night. I called Drivesavers at 8:00 PM Eastern and spoke with Sam. Sam is considered a Data Recovery Advisor by his employer. To me, he is part counselor for “talking me down”, part salesman for helping me understand the process and pricing, and part MD for helping my physical symptoms subside.

I FedExed my drives to them on Monday, spoke to them a couple of times during the week, and received my drives back the following Wednesday. Drivesavers has a few different pricing structures that are tied to turnaround time, data quantity, and complexity of the recovery. I chose the longer turnaround, had a lot of data, and low complexity (the drives still worked). ALL of my data was recovered with original filenames and directory structure. Great News! Now the hard part. This process cost me $3000.00 AFTER my nearly $550 discount for being a member of NAPP. SO, the moral of the story is twofold. 1. BACKUP YOUR DATA and 2. There is hope if something does happen.