Portable Hard Drive Malfunction

[MakersDozn]

Today we helped our brother buy a new PC for him and our father to use. Got it set up, no problem. But now the portable hard drive that stored all their old emails and stuff doesn't work right.

We took the portable drive home and tried it on our PC. Still nothing. We know that we "safely removed hardware" when we unplugged it from our brother's old PC.

WTF is going on?

To make matters worse, iomega (the company who makes the portable drive and the nearly identical one we have for our use) no longer exists. They were bought out by Lenovo, which basically discontinued the product line and related support. So now anyone who owns an iomega anything is up sh*t's creek.

We're going to take our brother's portable drive over to Best Buy and have the Geek Squad check it out. We have to prepare ourselves for the very likely possibility that our father's and brother's old emails are lost.

And we have to buy two new portable hard drives. Of another brand, obviously.

F*CK.

Laura and others

[nats]

frustrating! guessing you're not believers in cloud storage?

[MakersDozn]

(02-23-2014, 07:15 AM)nats Wrote: frustrating! guessing you're not believers in cloud storage?

Well, we are now.

We use box.com at work. We also have a free personal account there, but we haven't used it that much. You see, we place a high value on iterations, and we want our primary copy of any file to retain its original Date Created and Date Modified. If you upload it to the cloud, those dates change.

So the compromise is to have the external hard drive contain our primary copies of the files, and the cloud copies are the backups. We can't be picky about iterations if it means risking data loss. Better to have a backup than nothing should our primaries disappear.

Speaking of which, our FOO's external drive did still contain their files, but the Geek Squad guy said that they were all corrupted. So we had him wipe the drive.

Our father and brother weren't upset about the loss of emails, etc., but we were. We take pride in our organizational skills, and in the tech skills that we do have. If we lost our files, we'd be PO'd beyond belief. But our brother, ever the optimist, simply said, "We'll get more emails."

So we registered a free Box.com account for our FOO, and we plan to upgrade our own account to pro. That will get us 500GB, which is our preferred capacity for now.

   

And we also got two new Seagate drives, one for us and one for the FOO.

Thanks,

MDs

[tweeter]

Hi, I haven't been around lately. Sorry to hear about portable hard drive poof.
I have a Western Digital. I have no understanding of it, especially since an update problem. I've never tried to retrieve what is supposedly stored, and it is important material. What can I say.

Glad you could provide present - future remedy.

take care,
tweeter