Data Recovery Disaster

Forgive any formatting issues...I am writing this on my BlackBerry as I head into work.

Awhile back, I had a catastrophic system failure and lost a lot of data at home. Digital photos, my CD and DVD rips, source code...I lost a lot.

After that, I promised myself I wouldn't get burned again, so I bought myself a 500GB Western Digital MyBook and set it up as a backup drive. Every Thursday night as I would go to sleep, I would plug the drive in, start the backup, and it would be done by morning. Once a month, I would test the backup to ensure all was well.

This process had already saved me twice over the last year and so I was happy with it...until this morning.

I started the backup last night and when I woke up this morning, I noticed my computer was off. I turned it on and heard the clunk of death from my data drive, but my PC still booted. Booting made me feel better because that meant I just had to replace the drive and restore the backup.

I checked the backup logs and they said the backup completed prior to the power outage and I felt even happier.

I turned on the backup drive so I could quickly verify the backup before running to Fry's later...and there was no data on the drive.

A quick restore of the partition table and a reboot shows me a corrupted root directory.

Needless to say, I am not happy. I have most of the critical files backed up to DVD, but it sucks when your failsafe fails.