Death of a Harddrive

A couple of years back, my laptop stopped working very suddenly without any warning at all. I self diagnosed the problem as a failed hard drive. Despite my friends' pleading and apprehension, I decided to fix the computer myself. I have never been so nervous, sweat so much or seen so many tiny screws in my life. I managed to successfully replace the hard drive on my laptop and get it back up and running. It felt like a real victory. At that time, the true loss was the data on the hard drive. I was living from sofa to sofa doing shows promoting my album and everything was in storage. I did not have an external backup of my data so everything was lost.

As a result, I bought an external hard drive and another one to back that one up. Well, I must not have truly learned my lesson because tragically over the weekend my external hard drive died. I had just moved a bunch of files temporarily to that drive because I was out of room on my laptop and the other drive. In my long list of to dos for the week was the purchase of an additional drive to back everything up. Unfortunately, death came to my hard drive before I was able to do that.

I have lost music that I was working on, but oddly I am not freaking out. I am trying to work with the company that makes the drive to see if it is an issue where the data may still be recoverable. If it is a failure to the power part of the drive only, then this is a possibility. If not, then sadly I will have to start from scratch on a couple of songs. Luckily 90% of my music is on another hard drive which is still operational. I am waiting for the arrival of another drive tomorrow and I will back that 90% up onto that. The one good thing is that even if the drive that died is completely dead it is still under warranty so the worst case scenario is that I will be given a replacement drive.

As someone told me when my laptop died... "It is not a matter of IF your hard drive will fail. It is a matter of when."

Always back up the data that is important to you. It could happen at any time.

It's a broken hard drive. I know what to do. I just need some duct tape and superglue.