theskeptic's Journal: data

My laptop's hard disk gave up the ghost about 2 weeks back right at the time I was moving house. So I used my father's laptop until yesterday. A week back I went to buy a replacement hard disk and the NOT ONE of the wankers in my city's computer district had a 2.5inch 5400rpm hdd or 7200rpm drive. Seriously, how sorry is that? This is India's so called "silicon valley" and even after talking directly to the manufacturer's distributors, I was told they didn't import such stuff. Finally, after a lot of searching, I found a WD scorpio 5400rpm drive but it doesn't seem such a good performer. Will try to get a 7200rpm drive sometime soon to replace it.

The last backup of my laptop's hard disk was 1 month old. That means I lost a ton of useful data. Arrggh! 18 months back, I lost a partition on a desktop hard drive and the most imp data on that hard drive was on that partition and it was just 2MB in size. That hard disk now sits packed in a box, waiting for a proper data recovery service.

The laptop's hard drive data will also have to be recovered but I'm hoping to get it done by next week. And what's the point of this journal? The point is in this nytimes article. E.R. for Hard Drives. Its a lot cheaper to buy a hard drive or two, and backup your data rather than pay 1-9k $ and have it recovered later.