Disaster Recovery for $25 or Less

Thursday, June 5th, 2008 by Gary Keorkunian
Posted in How To |

In a recent article I wrote of the demise of a good friend’s warehouse and with it his two office PC’s and a laptop containing his only backups. Well, he was finally able to go into the building to recover what salvageable items that he could. Of course one of his primary concerns was his business data so he pulled both PC’s from the destroyed office and gave them to me to see what I could do.

The cases were pretty badly melted. The PC’s had also been saturated with thousands of gallons of water courtesy of our local fire company. I had little hope of recovering any of the data. Nevertheless, using a crowbar and hammer I was able pull the case apart and gain access to the key hard drive. Surprisingly, the drive itself was in good shape despite a good covering of soot. The sheet of rubber covering the controller board seemed intact. This gave me some hope that I might be able to get the drive running again - even if it did smell like a burnt hot dog.

To get the drive working I used a most useful device called a hard drive enclosure. The enclosure essentially includes a mounting rail to hold the hard drive, a USB I/O board, a case to protect it all and a power cord. It essentially allows you to turn an internal hard drive into an external USB-based hard drive. I’ve used the enclosure countless times in situations where a computer dies for reasons other than a HD crash and it’s always worked like a charm. I wasn’t sure how well it would work in this situation, however.

I carefully mounted the hard drive in the enclosure, connected the data ribbon and power supply. When I plugged the unit in and turned it on it seemed to spin up with out a problem. I connected the enclosure to my PC’s USB port and it was immediately recognized. Whew! I was able to recover all of my friend’s critical data including his QuickBooks data file, customer proposals, contracts and more. Obviously we were very lucky that the HD did not succumb to the heat. The recovery of this data saved him the many hundreds or thousands of dollars it would have taken to rebuild it all by hand.

A typical hard drive enclosure only costs about $25 but the benefits are almost priceless. If you find yourself with a dead or destroyed PC but an intact hard drive, then I highly recommend purchasing one of these devices.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 11:30 am and is filed under How To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Disaster Recovery for $25 or Less”
  • Bob Yokl Says:
    June 6th, 2008 at 8:43 am

    I have not had the experience of a fire but I have had my office robbed and all the computers taken away but luckily I had my backups to fall back on. I have also had to use an encloser similar to what you recommended here when a motherboard went bad on a laptop and was able to recover the information nicely.

    Here is my question….What do you recommend for a home business user that has over 150 gigs of business information (spreadsheets, graphics, etc.) I have onsite external drives I use for backing up but going to an online backup seems to me that it will take weeks to get my data transferred over to an online backup company. Is there any other ways here?

  • Gary Keorkunian Says:
    June 6th, 2008 at 10:58 am

    Hi Bob,

    That is a good amount of information and you are right, uploading this information to an online backup service would take quite some time. Here are some other options you can consider:

    - If a good amount of this information is static, that is you are no longer updating the information, then save that data to a few archives using tape/data cartridges or external hard drives and take them off site.

    - Identify the files and data sets that you update regularly. If that is of a more reasonable size then consider using an online backup service for that smaller subset. Remember also, that many backup tools - including online services - will only backup files that changed. That should significantly reduce the time it takes to run a backup.

    - If you are updating an extremely large subset of this data on a regular basis then I would consider having a couple of large capacity external hard drives. Keep one connected to your system over night to run a backup and take the other off site. Then, each day - or at least a couple of times a week - swap the two drives a take the one with the most recent backup off site.

    150GB is a lot of data and I’m sure you have spent many years creating it all. Therefore, protecting it is very important. If you are unsure about using any of the techniques I’ve described here I believe it would be worth it for you to work with a professional who can help you develop an appropriate data protection strategy.

    Thanks for your comment.

    Gary

  • Bob Yokl Says:
    June 8th, 2008 at 3:20 pm

    I used the Carbonite link on your web site on Friday Night and I am already halfway through backing up my 150 gig of information. I do have a bit of a faster connection but all things being equal, for 49.95 a year, I can put that much data on back it is just amazing. All the other sites upcharged big time once your data goes over 50 gigabytes and in this day and age of buying movies from Itunes you don’t want to buy a move for your ipod then have to delete because of space.

  • Gary Keorkunian Says:
    June 8th, 2008 at 4:11 pm

    Bob, that’s awesome. Sounds like Carbonite is the provider of choice for super big backup sets.

    Thanks for the review.

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