Tech help request

[demusetta]

The computer I use for nearly everything at school decided to die this morning.  I turned it on and, where usually I see a little green light and hear a whir, I saw flashing red lights and heard very loud beeping.  The tech guy at school's response was "Yeah, sounds like a fatal hard drive failure. School won't even try to fix that.  Try using your

Comments

[auspeople]

There are places you can take failed disks to get the data off. This is what I did when mine got wet. I think we got a referral from Microcenter... or maybe they did the recovery.

a-h-scientist would know. But there are folks that do this for a living. It ain't cheap... but you get your data back.

And get a good backup system. Seriously, it can save you butt! Say she, who has a backup system, but doesn't DO IT.

*sigh*

[demusetta]

Yeah--the money thing. Sigh. I can, theoretically, recreate everything that was on my computer. It will just take time and frustrate the @#$% out of me. No way the school will pay, even though it would probably be cost-effective to do so. If it's not hideously expensive, I'll probably just pay for it myself.

The big frustration is going to be recreating all of the documents. I have most of them in hard copy--maybe I can draft some students to do the typing...or pay the boy-child, who just took a keyboarding class...hmm. Many possibilities.

What kind of back-up system do you use?

[auspeople]

I used to have a CMS external drive, to which I could back up my entire computer just by clicking a button, but it's too small for my system now. We just purchased an external drive for music, and we plan to either use that also for backups or just back up the essential folders to the CMS.

But K still hasn't set it up.

Hope K responds with info on the disk places. I think it cost a couple hundred for our fix... I could look it up in Quicken if you want the exact number.

Good luck!

[tubin]

For documents that you are not likely to edit in future: just scan them.

For documents you might want to edit in the future: try scanning the hard copies using Optical Character Recognition. This converts the image into editable text. Works very well for single-column documents in standard fonts.

I have an OK setup for scanning stuff - my scanner has a page feeder which is a huge blessing for multi-page documents. We could scan into the OCR and then you could pay the boy-child to go over the originals and correct scanning errors in the new documents.

[b3zsgirl]

You can get an 80 gig portable hard drive that will fit in your purse for $50. Once you get it back, bake a backup.