Posted: 25 February 2011 17:04

I've had yet another data mishap due to an extreme failure on my laptop. Fortunately, I have managed to access most of the data I thought had been lost, but my email is still affected.

Data failure

This is another lesson in keeping regular back-ups of my data. Very fortunately, after a series of hiccups over the past few years, I've been filling up an external hard drive. However, I missed completing my previous back-up as the drive was nearly full - a big mistake.

The photo shows the hard drive of my Dell laptop removed from the machine and wired up as an external drive to my old Packard Bell laptop (note to self: the one that kept working reliably all these years). I had to spend £30 extending my warranty to permit me to remove this drive, as the laptop itself has now been sent off to Dell's 'computer hospital' for extensive tests; they would have completey wiped the hard drive, but the warranty extension allows me to keep the old one and a new drive will be fitted instead.

This laptop has had the graphics card replaced twice in the past, but in the last week I've spent hours doing diagnostics over the phone (including removing memory chips) and have had two engineers visit my house. This resulted in one memory chip being replaced, then the motherboard (twice) and finally the LCD screen, all to no avail.

All this fault-finding was working its way dangerously close to the hard drive and so I decided to buy its way out of the warranty and hope that the data was still safe on it.

So far it seems intact and I've grabbed key data (such as photos and the latest website upgrade), but I've still not recovered my full email capability and so there is a backlog in this department.

The most important thing is that the data is recoverable and is being backed up onto a new hard drive.

In the meantime, I've not been out and about very much, but I do have some posts awaiting concerning some cylinders at Seaford, anti-landing trenches, and a fascinating outing to an underground Battle HQ...

- Pete

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