So, if you’ve been using a computer for any significant amount of time, you probably have a lot data collected on your computer. It could be anything from pictures, videos, and games to stuff like financial documents, company records, or important legal documents. Computer professionals everywhere recommend that data be backed up on a regular basis, but who really has time for that?

Unfortunately for me, the worst has happened: a hard drive crash. It could not have happened at a worse time. I had just upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7, so I had all of my files on one drive while I formatted the other and installed Windows. A few days ago, my drive suddenly started making a horrible screeching/whining noise, coupled with repetitive beeping. That was basically it for my drive; the computer froze and it would not reboot with the drive still in it. I had to remove the drive to get the computer to boot. Luckily my primary boot drive was OK, so I can still use the computer.

Sure, I could pay somebody to recover the data, but I don’t have that kind of money right now. Data recovery services start at around $300 and up depending on how severe the problem is. Now I’m trying to take inventory on all the data I lost. It’s kind of hard to sit down and make a list of everything that was gone.

As far as I can remember, this is some of the things that were on the dead drive:

• About 2Gb of photos, images, and Photoshop projects
• About 50Gb of videos and video projects
• All of my programming projects, ever
• All of my school reports and projects from 2006 onward
• About 10Gb of music and other audio files

Luckily, I hadn’t gotten much in the way of school done this semester, so I didn’t have any current homework or projects on the drive at the time.

My plan is to save up enough money to buy a pair of 1TB drives and put them in a RAID 1 configuration. That should give me enough storage for quite a while, yet allow redundancy in the drives. RAID 1 basically takes two hard drives and makes them work as one. A copy of everything is stored on both disks. If either one fails, there is still a backup of the data on file.

However, maybe it’s not as important for me to be such a hoarder with my data. It’s not like there was much financial value of the data. It was mostly all sentimental. I do still feel pretty bad, and if you’ve ever had any experience with lost data, you can probably relate. It feels the same to lose a bunch of family heirlooms in a house fire. However, as a person, I can’t let myself be defined by my data. The data is defined by me, as it is what I generated. If you’re looking for emotional support on dealing with data loss, take it from me: you are not your data. Think of it as a somewhat fresh start. If you really don’t want to lose your series of 1′s and 0′s, be sure to keep another copy of your 1′s and 0′s somewhere else, be it online, on a DVD, or another hard drive.