A little while ago, my MacBook froze on me and when I tried to restart it, I was greeted with a grey screen and flashing folder with a question mark. To add to that, there was a clicking sound coming from the machine. You can imagine what my response to that was, …….!!!!
After getting over that initial reaction, I started thinking about a possible fix and intentions. One thing that I had been intending to do for the past few months was backing up my data. I have never had a hard drive fail on me so I didn’t feel any real urgency to get it done as soon as possible. With all of that in mind, you can imagine how I felt on that fateful day, I was kicking myself!
The next logical step was finding a solution to rectify the problem. The possible fixes I found on good old Google didn’t produce the desired results which meant having to go to someone with a bit more technical know how. The assessment from the people I got in touch with was that it was a hard drive issue which meant a rebuild and data recovery.
MacBook Rebuild
Getting my machine up and running again was a relatively simple and inexpensive process. All that I needed to do was get a new hard drive and reinstall OS X which meant buying a disc from Apple.
MacBook Hard Drive Data Recovery
For this step, I sent the drive out to data recovery specialists. This is process that a lot of people probably would not go ahead with and just cut their loses because of the costs involved. But, my drive held data that I really didn’t want to lose. Unfortunately, my drive had platter damage and a recovery was not possible and I lost a substantial amount of important data.
Lessons Learned
The biggest lesson I learnt from this experience was to backup my data!
The funny thing about this whole experience is that all the other machines in the house had been backed up (and done so regularly) but for some reason I had not done one on the MacBook for a while. I kept on putting it off and the end result was disaster.
After my machine was up an running again, I made sure to purchase a portable device to backup my data in the interim. I am working on getting a suitable network attached storage (NAS) solution for seamless backup of the content on all of our devices.
The experience was costly because of everything that I lost. If you don’t want to end up in a situation where you are staring at a failed hard drive that you can’t retrieve any data from, I would strongly encourage you to get a backup solution in place and fast!
Have you experienced the pain of losing your precious data?
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