I was almost passed out when I sat down at our computer and saw only one word document on our storage drive.  I put the 500GB drive in earlier this year to store our family pictures and videos as a backup, and to allow me to format our system drive.  Well, that worked out fine, until Friday when I couldn’t find any of the last 8 years worth of files, pictures, and videos.  Needless to say, I was alittle distressed.

I finally was able to get everything back.  Luckly it wasn’t a horrible drive failure.  I thought someone else might be interested in some of the tricks you can use to try to recover lost data yourself.  In windows there is a utility built in called Check Disk.  You can use it to identify bad sectors on your hard drive and often times to repair those bad sectors.  Microsoft has an article on how to use Check Disk here.  There are also a few free or fairly inexpensive (inexpensive compared to the thousands of dollars it can cost to send your drive to a recovery specialist) utilities available from a company called Runtime Software.  They have a recovery utility for $79, and you can try it for free to see if it will work before you buy it.  Very handy.

Runtime also has a free utility for cloning your hard drive, called Shadow Copy.  It is what I am now using to backup my computer.  I have a hard drive in a lockable “hotswap” tray that serves as my backup.  In the event of a fire or such event, I can quickly grab that drive which will be an exact copy of my computer (windows, programs, files, and all).  Or in the event of my hard drive crashing, I can boot my backup and be up and running in under 5 minutes exactly where I left off.  Pretty nice setup.  There are other product available to do this, but I’m cheap.  This works for me. 

I’m just happy I got my files back!  Yeah for Check Disk!!!