Full Circle Associates

When things go wrong, it's nice to have friends. I should have known I was headed towards a hard drive failure. The signs were there. I almost even backed up my files last night after 2 long days of finishing the data analysis on a client project.

But I didn't.

I think I aged about 5 years today. This morning it happened. After trying all sorts of things, calling my tech friend (who is in RENO!) I did a google search and talked to a few local data recovery services. Most were not helpful. But then I called MJ Thompson Network Solutions and talked to Robert.

Now it turns out Robert is in Lyndon Washington, about 2.5 hours from here. He said he would give it a try if we brought up the hard drive and if it worked, the fee would be $89. If he could not recover the data, there would be no charge.

The other people I talked to would not even begin to estimate time or cost. Not even a ballpark. So the second nice set of people kicked into gear: my husband and eldest son. They agreed to drive up to Lynden while I worked here in my office on reconstructing the last two days of work. Luckily I had printed out a great deal of the data because I had to look at it in a number of ways, and that's when I find paper helpful.

SO they drove up, stopping in Bellingham to pick up my youngest for a visit (he goes to school in Bellingham.) They took the machine to Robert, who spent nearly 3 hours trying. He identified the problem as being the mechanism that reads the harddrive, an IBM piece that is apparantly known for problems. But alas, he could not extract the data. And no charge. I tried to pay him something, but he refused. I said, "I'm going to blog about you" to let others know how kind and helpful you were, even if the harddrive would not cooperate. My husband and son just arrived back, ready for dinner.

Next I have to decide if I want to pay for expensive, clean room hard drive data recovery. I have 2 weeks of email files that are precious... and not so many documents that I can't recover. But the time. The heartache.

My next planned purchase was going to be a desktop with redundant drives. I had already started shopping. I only wish I had started earlier.. and had backed up last night.

We all know it... yet sometimes we don't heed.

Thanks anyway, Robert!