Geek: Data Storage, How much is a memory worth?
Here's a data storage tale of woe:
I got a 1TB drive with the noble goals of data unification, so I could venture mobile, out into the world with everything consolidated in one place.
About a month of owning it, shortly after getting data onto it off the 5.5 separate drives (one contained part of another harddrive that got reformatted), apparently the power supply started to go bad causing the device to reboot every 3 seconds, which apparently was due to a underpowered power supply. It's still covered under warranty which Hitachi has been awesomely responsive to work with. They suggested sending a replacement power supply, but out of curiosity tried the iJuice universal power supply with an appropriately sized tip, and the drive didn't even power up. Getting the replacement power indicated things had gotten worse...smell of burning chips. *sigh*
I expect all technology to fail. I backup work projects frequently, to flash drive (hourly), to google SVN, and S3, and a nightly backup locally, for the case I delete/overwrite something. In the past I had a separate machine with room to spare for complete images of the drives (my normal routine), but that went defunct a few months ago, and I'm trying to reduce my gear, 3-4 machines is too many for one person to maintain. Anyway, I was gambling, I had one machine, with 1 folder with about 6 months of photos and voice recordings from this year that didn't make it onto any source, because it was large so copying it on an almost full drive didn't make sense, and on the periphery of importance.
Getting the files off my primary drive onto the 1TB, I chose to use a 'cut' operation as I was trying to merge them into other folders, and shortly after, ironically the nightly incremental project backup overwrote the cut/deleted files making them inaccessible, then the external drive failed...doh.
Since it's an external drive, there are roughly 5 levels of damage:
1) reversably data damage (deleting formatting drives)
2) irreversable data manipulation (overwriting bits with other bits)
3) the external USB/Firewire interface or power supply goes bad or can't power the drive.
4) the harddrive electronics were damaged
5) physical damage to the harddrive disk.
1-3 are typically easy to replace/fix if possible to fix, 2 is what happened to me so while there may be remnants on disk, the files have mostly likely been corrupted. 4 and 5 require professional recovery, and often cleanroom environment. It's very rare for (5) on new drives, though very common for (4) on new drives, usually being a design defect or a faulty part.
So what was a good deal on $300 hardrive is getting expensive quickly:
Here's a recovery quote:
Standard fee for Other: $378.99
High Capacity Surcharge > 560GB: $1000.00
Clean room (if necessary): $300.00
Total Estimated charges: $1378.99 to 1678.99.
Other vendors slice the pricing in different ways but end up with similar costs between $500-$2500, typically $900-$1300 as the average, if you choose 'standard' recovery, if you choose priority service it can skyrocket to $9000. The way it works is that, they charge recovery based on the size of the drive regardless of how much you want off of it. So need 400MB off a 500MB is cheaper than 1MB off of 1TB.
As soon as they get it, while the estimate is 0-$100, it's going to run $300+ (on par of the drive cost) to do any data retrieval, and they will charge you that to unformat or undelete even though utilities can do that for $30 if you have a spare drive.
http://www.file-recovery.net/order.htm
At $300, just to get started, with a reasonable probability of just the USB/ATA interface getting damaged, I opted to removed the USB case and tested it with a normal usb harddrive enclosure. Sadly same burning smell...and visible smoke with the case off. *sigh* Leaving only recovery of the drive as an option for just that gigabyte or so.
Seeing as it's only photos/voice recordings it's not the end of the world if it's lost, especially for someone like me so busy looking forward there's not much time to look back. Unlike a fire there is at least some salvage-ability, even if I don't know exactly what it is I'm recovering. It's rare one has to quantify to the penny/dollar how much is a memory, and potentially a life worth. In comparison $1200 is a month of living expenses.
Ironically, my webhosting provider just gave me 1TB of storage + hosting for $40/year, so from their perspective 1TB isn't worth much, it wouldn't surprise me if they are using Amazon S3 or something similar.
I got a 1TB drive with the noble goals of data unification, so I could venture mobile, out into the world with everything consolidated in one place.
About a month of owning it, shortly after getting data onto it off the 5.5 separate drives (one contained part of another harddrive that got reformatted), apparently the power supply started to go bad causing the device to reboot every 3 seconds, which apparently was due to a underpowered power supply. It's still covered under warranty which Hitachi has been awesomely responsive to work with. They suggested sending a replacement power supply, but out of curiosity tried the iJuice universal power supply with an appropriately sized tip, and the drive didn't even power up. Getting the replacement power indicated things had gotten worse...smell of burning chips. *sigh*
I expect all technology to fail. I backup work projects frequently, to flash drive (hourly), to google SVN, and S3, and a nightly backup locally, for the case I delete/overwrite something. In the past I had a separate machine with room to spare for complete images of the drives (my normal routine), but that went defunct a few months ago, and I'm trying to reduce my gear, 3-4 machines is too many for one person to maintain. Anyway, I was gambling, I had one machine, with 1 folder with about 6 months of photos and voice recordings from this year that didn't make it onto any source, because it was large so copying it on an almost full drive didn't make sense, and on the periphery of importance.
Getting the files off my primary drive onto the 1TB, I chose to use a 'cut' operation as I was trying to merge them into other folders, and shortly after, ironically the nightly incremental project backup overwrote the cut/deleted files making them inaccessible, then the external drive failed...doh.
Since it's an external drive, there are roughly 5 levels of damage:
1) reversably data damage (deleting formatting drives)
2) irreversable data manipulation (overwriting bits with other bits)
3) the external USB/Firewire interface or power supply goes bad or can't power the drive.
4) the harddrive electronics were damaged
5) physical damage to the harddrive disk.
1-3 are typically easy to replace/fix if possible to fix, 2 is what happened to me so while there may be remnants on disk, the files have mostly likely been corrupted. 4 and 5 require professional recovery, and often cleanroom environment. It's very rare for (5) on new drives, though very common for (4) on new drives, usually being a design defect or a faulty part.
So what was a good deal on $300 hardrive is getting expensive quickly:
Here's a recovery quote:
Standard fee for Other: $378.99
High Capacity Surcharge > 560GB: $1000.00
Clean room (if necessary): $300.00
Total Estimated charges: $1378.99 to 1678.99.
Other vendors slice the pricing in different ways but end up with similar costs between $500-$2500, typically $900-$1300 as the average, if you choose 'standard' recovery, if you choose priority service it can skyrocket to $9000. The way it works is that, they charge recovery based on the size of the drive regardless of how much you want off of it. So need 400MB off a 500MB is cheaper than 1MB off of 1TB.
As soon as they get it, while the estimate is 0-$100, it's going to run $300+ (on par of the drive cost) to do any data retrieval, and they will charge you that to unformat or undelete even though utilities can do that for $30 if you have a spare drive.
http://www.file-recovery.net/order.htm
At $300, just to get started, with a reasonable probability of just the USB/ATA interface getting damaged, I opted to removed the USB case and tested it with a normal usb harddrive enclosure. Sadly same burning smell...and visible smoke with the case off. *sigh* Leaving only recovery of the drive as an option for just that gigabyte or so.
Seeing as it's only photos/voice recordings it's not the end of the world if it's lost, especially for someone like me so busy looking forward there's not much time to look back. Unlike a fire there is at least some salvage-ability, even if I don't know exactly what it is I'm recovering. It's rare one has to quantify to the penny/dollar how much is a memory, and potentially a life worth. In comparison $1200 is a month of living expenses.
Ironically, my webhosting provider just gave me 1TB of storage + hosting for $40/year, so from their perspective 1TB isn't worth much, it wouldn't surprise me if they are using Amazon S3 or something similar.