Almost a year ago, I had a major hard drive crash. It came without warning. I just turned on the computer one morning and a message appeared from SmartDrive that said "A hard drive failure is imminent". First of all, I didn't know I had SmartDrive or have any idea about what it does. My second thought was that it was another one of those ad-ware or spy-ware messages that was going to offer to scan my drive for free. Naturally, after the scan it would tell me how many problems I was facing and then try to sell me some software, at an outrageous price, that would clean up the mess. So I tried to turn it off or close it or delete it or something but had no luck. I finally rebooted the machine and the same message came up.

Now I was getting mad and worried. What worried me was that my wife had been bugging me to save all the photos to a disk. She did not want to lose all those memories, especially the ones of our grandson. If I lost them, at the very least, she would divorce me but more than likely she would kill me first and then divorce me. I just had to get this fixed before she found out. I tried running a virus scan but the software could not find the hard drive. Great! I attempted to run a spy-ware/ad-ware detection software but again, no hard drive was detected. My heartbeat was getting faster and I started sweating. I had to go to work and didn't know what to do next. So I put a note on the computer that said "Don't Touch". That always works, since nobody knows how fix anything about the computer and they would just assume that I was running a virus scan.

I went to work and during lunch I purchased a new hard drive. When I got home I told my wife that everything was under control. I installed the new hard drive and using my most recent backups (six months old) and the recovery disks, I was able to get "functional". Fortunately, my wife had no immediate need to see the old photos and I was able to keep her from finding out that I hadn't listened to her, again.

Once I was up and running, I started looking for hard drive and data recovery software that I could use at home. There were a lot of choices, so I narrowed down the search by adding the word "FREE" to my search. Well, that didn't help much because most of the available software includes a "FREE" trial. You load it up and it scans and lets you know what files can be recovered. Once you see what is there, and agree that you are satisfied, you have to pay the price to actually recover anything. I tried several and most could not find the hard drive. Sound familiar? There were a couple that seemed to be finding files and even gave me the names of files I recognized. However, it took several hours just to find one or two files, so I calculated that it would take several weeks to go through the whole drive. I thought that was too long and decided that there must be some very serious problem preventing the software from finding the files quickly.

So I started looking for companies that performed data recovery. Well, just like the software, there were a lot to choose from. Since I was getting desperate and I didn't have much money to spend on the recovery, I picked a few of the more interesting (low priced) ones and started comparing the promises they made. In the end I selected the second lowest priced. The said they would determine if the hard drive could be repaired before doing a recovery. If, in fact, it could be repaired, they would contact me with an estimate. If it could not be repaired they had two prices, the "easy recovery" price and the "difficult recovery" price. They warned me upfront that only about 10% were easily recoverable. They also sent me an email which contained a list of the files and folders they could recover and only charged me after I agreed that those were the files I wanted. The only things that seemed to be missing were some old files that I either didn't need any longer or were on a earlier backup I had on disk. In the end I got all of my files and folders back either from the recovery or old backups. It took some time to get everything organized and set up properly,but it was well worth the $199.00 I paid.

Soon after, I purchased a new computer system. This time I also purchased a Western Digital, 500GB, My Book, which is an external hard drive. I have it set up to do an automatic backup every Monday morning, right after the automatic virus, spy-ware, malware scan. As of November I have a second grandson and lots of new pictures. We looked at the files a week ago and we have over 10,000 pictures in the computer AND on the backup hard drive.

In the end I didn't get divorced and obviously she didn't kill me either, but it was scary going to sleep for awhile. Now I don't have to worry and now I'm the one who nags about backups and copies of everything.

I didn't tell you the name of the company, who did the recovery for a couple of reasons; first, not every situation is the same and second in the end I wasn't all that happy with the way they communicated what was happening. Besides, I did what I did because of limited funds and could have gotten faster, better results from other companies. However, only you can decide what is best for you.

In many cases you can do the recovery yourself, if you have the patience and can do without the computer for several days. There are also ways to be forewarned that something is going wrong, but you have to pay attention to the signs.