It's been about two weeks since The Great Portable Hard Drive Crash of 2008, and I think I've recovered well enough to talk about it. Simply put, I've had a certain portable hard drive for over two months already when it suddenly sputtered into utter lifelessness, slowing down my computer and being utterly inaccessible. Even plugging it into another PC didn't do a thing. After a few tweaks and moderately unsuccessful attempts to recover my files, I was forced to conclude that the hard drive just...died. Threw me into a tizzy, it did, because it contained two months of work, most of which entailed weeping in front of Photoshop. Gone. Just like that. Ouch.

I could have had them retrieved by going to people who do data recovery, except their services cost an arm and a leg. I even looked up data recovery services online and stumbled upon Flashback Data, which looks like particularly good provider of this service; they recover data from desktops, laptops, and servers, among other things. Interestingly enough, they are also involved with Computer Forensics, a term which I didn't know existed; I do hear about the actual practice a lot, however.

The hard drive is currently out for repairs, and I think it'll take one more week till I get it back, unfortunately. The whole ordeal slapped a very important lesson in my face: Backup obsessively, and backup frequently.