I hope Rose won't mind me printing an excerpt from her email:
"My G$ hard drive imploded a week or so ago, making a grinding noise that the Mac engineer had never heard before. It had chapters for a book on it which I'm keen to get back."
Sadly we couldn't help as we only attempt data recovery on PC drives that are in full working mechanical order. Anything else is a job for a specialist.

But it's a cautionary tale. Hard drives fail, laptops get lost and stolen, files get accidentally overwritten, software misbehaves and leaves data in a corrput state. When stuff like this happens then you're in much better shape if you've got a backup of the data rather than relying on a data recovery service.

There are quite a few considerations in setting up backup software to take regular backups and I'll talk more about that in later posts. For now, if you have no backups then here is the absolute minimum that you must do. Starting right now, please!

1. Identify the data on your machine that you really can't afford to lose.
2. Identify how much space that data takes up.
3. Identify a form of media separate to the machine that would accomodate that amount of data. Possibilities include: a USB memory stick; recordable CD or DVD; an external hard drive; a shared folder on another machine on your network.
4. Now copy the data. The simplest thing is probably just to open up two My Computer windows and drag the files from one to the other.
5. Put an entry in your diary to do the next one in a week's time or whatever.
6. Congratulate yourself on a job well done and have a cup of tea.

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