A client brought an external drive into us that contained all of her most valuable digital assets: photos, music, home videos, documents and ALL of her uni course work.
The problem is that she cannot read the drive and she has no other copies of the data.
We have tried every technique in the book and we just cannot get the drive to talk to us. We have replaced the controller board, sorted some dry joints, used various file systems to try and kick the drive into life, even a short spell in the freezer and the old electric short jump start failed :(
Alas we are unable to help her
So the lesson to be learned is that external drives are fallible and they WILL fail at some point. Do not rely on them as your sole means of backup. U must have at least 3, preferably 5 copies of your data in existence at any one time AND in separate geographical locations.
Local, external drive and online backups should all be part of your backup strategy.
A very useful saying: Just remember Jesus saves, Buddha makes incremental backups. Thanks to Scott Cowie for this gem
A blog about the day to day events within the computer and laptop repair workshop in Perth, Scotland http://www.pcsolutions.co.uk/
