Backup — what’s that?

It’s an old, sad song that’s heard many times a day all around the world, yet its pathos never fails to bring a tear — especially when you’re close to the subject. Perhaps you’ve heard it before, or even sung it yourself. It’s called “Hard Drive Failure and I Ain’t Got No Backup”, and it recently received a soulful rendition by my sister-in-law. She and her family came to visit for Thanksgiving, so of course she brought her laptop for me to fix since I’m the techie in the family.

“Read failure on internal hard drive,” the system stated unemotionally upon attempting to boot, laconically omitting the grave implications of this state of affairs.

It didn’t take long to figure out that this drive was beyond repair — or even a temporary cryogenic resuscitation. I was just about ready to install a new drive and start from scratch when my oldest son called to wish us a Happy Thanksgiving. He works at Best Buy while on hiatus from college, and he told me that their Geek Squad offers a data recovery service that has a relatively high rate of success. They can remove the platter from a failing drive and transfer the data onto DVD’s. My sister-in-law was happy to give this a try.

Of course, they weren’t open on Thanksgiving. Nor was the Geek Squad available on the day after — they were all covering the Black Friday sales floor. Finally, they were able to take it in on Saturday. My sister-in-law paid extra to expedite service, since she wanted me to setup everything on the new hard drive and she needed to return home on Monday. We waited in anticipation all that day and the next morning, hoping for good news.

Every now and then one of us would say, “Well, I sure hope they can get that data back. All those documents and pictures — not to mention the email history.”

To which everyone would nod and say, “Yep.”

“From now on I want you to backup your system at least weekly, ” I would lecture.

“Oh, I will. If only they can recover it all for me.”

“Yeah — as long as the platter itself wasn’t damaged, they think they can. Tell me again exactly what happened when it failed…”

“I was just working along, reading my email, and the whole thing suddenly shut off. When I turned it back on, I got that message about a read failure.”

“And was there any unusual sound associated with that event?”

Her husband chimed in, “Oh yeah, it sounded like a jet airplane taking off!”

“Kind of a high-pitched screeching noise?” I asked.

“Uh huh.”

“Like the sound of 200 billion bits of data screaming in horror as they were being flayed alive by the head dragging across the disk?”

“Maybe.”

“Well that’s probably not a good sign.”

Sure enough, the members of the Geek Squad were unable to recover any data. “It’s fried,” they said. “Scrambled” seemed technically more accurate to me.

We retrieved the empty corpse of my sister-in-law’s computer, along with a new hard drive (at least she doubled her storage), and I spent five and a half hours yesterday reinstalling the operating system (XP SP2), downloading and installing the 122 updates, and setting up Microsoft Office 2007. I faced only one glitch: for some reason the installation couldn’t locate a suitable driver for the Ethernet controller — which severely limits connectivity. Using the Dell service tag number, I was able to locate the driver online and download it (what would you do if you had no other computers? I couldn’t help thinking). Her system doesn’t have a floppy drive and somehow I’ve misplaced my USB thumb-drive, so I had to burn a DVD just to transfer the driver to her system. But it installed fine, and by the end of three very good football games and several bottles of very nice wine, we declared the operation a poignantly limited success.