Hard Drive Headaches

Being in a rural area, my internet speeds are usually lackluster at best!  Having so much of my business dependent on technology, it has always been a struggle to keep my desktop computer updated since operating system downloads were usually pretty great in size and I would put them off due to excessively long download times.  Unfortunately, putting off updates for the sake of saving time seemed to have finally caught up to me.  An internal issue, seemingly from lack of updating the operating system, caused an unexpected loss of startup files.  In the process of trying to repair the problem with those specific files, I made issues even grimmer when I accidentally wiped the hard drive completely!

To say I should have been better prepared with an external backup of some sort would be very wise advice indeed!  With no backup of all the files and programs I utilize, I began to go into full-blown panic mode!  Having had stored everything since I became an owner-operator on that computer and that it basically contained everything from contractor settlement programs to every blog article I had ever written as a Freightliner Team Run Smart Pro, there was just reason for at least a certain amount of alarm!

I decided to do a Google search for the topic of “wiping a hard drive”, in which I was lucky enough to find several promising online services specializing in data recovery.  One that seemed to be highly rated and offered help for both accidental and intentional erasing of files was called Recoverit, which I chose to use to help me “drill down” into my system to help recover what I had lost.  What a great and useful tool this was for me in what seemed a hopeless moment of need!

Since there were years worth of data and a ton of files to go through, a full scan from start to finish took about one whole day.  From there it gave a file list of everything it was able to recover, which in my case was just over 300,000 files!  With the premium plan, I was allowed to choose which of these I wanted to recover and after selecting the most critical files, it took another morning of work in the office to recover my selected files.  With the help of Office365 already having stored my Word and Excel documents in their cloud and this Recoverit program, I was able to get my computer back up and running normally again in around 2 days on my own.

From this incident, I have learned a valuable lesson… Always, always have a system backup!  I am now going to utilize Apple Time Machine to “snapshot” my system occasionally, as well as periodically backing up my entire system to an external hard drive.  Using technology to aid in efficiency has long been a great tool to advance my business.  The fact that it could all disappear in a moment’s notice was a sobering fact and a realization that I was not as prepared as I needed to be with such a level of technological dependence.  Thank goodness a program like Recoverit was there when I needed it most, but I hope the new protocols I have put into place in my office mean I never need to utilize it again!