Lost $600 worth of client data when my backup drive failed last Tuesday

I was working on a big web design project for a local dentist office when my external hard drive just died out of nowhere. I had been backing up files every night but the drive itself was 4 years old and I never checked its health. Turns out the drive had been throwing errors for months and I ignored them because the files still seemed fine. I ended up paying a data recovery service $400 but only got about half the files back. Now I use two separate backup drives and test them every month with a free health check tool. Has anyone else had their main backup fail on them like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_olivia1d agoOG Member

Was your backup drive powered by hopes and dreams or what? Nothing like a $600 lesson in trusting old hardware to keep you humble.

taylor.brooke1d ago

lmao did you actually think that old drive would hold up or were you just being cheap with the replacement?

the_nancy15h ago

Taylor Brooke has a point but $600 isn't really that much in the grand scheme of things. People act like losing some files is the end of the world but most clients won't even notice if you rebuild their site from scratch. Your mileage may vary of course but I've seen folks lose six figures worth of data and still bounce back in a week. At the end of the day it's just web design files not a kidney or something.