The Great Crash of 2011

It finally happened to us.  After countless blogs and conversations with people about saving their files and utilizing back-up systems, we lived through what amounts to a natural disaster.  Our main computer crashed. 

Here's how we typically work:  we use an external hardrive as our primary drive and then back that up to our PC.  It's worked nicely especially when we need to go from our pc to our laptops. We simply unplug the external hard drive and away we go.

This past week our PC's crashed.  No problem.  They crashed so hard that we had to reset them to when we took them out of the box from the company.  We spent countless hours restoring and reloading all of our programs.  Finally got it up and running...disaster was right around the corner...just waiting for us...

So we took the external drive and plugged it in to the PC so that we could back it up (a typical practice for us).  But suddenly the computer was reading the external drive.  No worries - probably because we completely trashed and rebuilt the pc.  So we plugged it in to a laptop, then another pc, then another laptop...at this point we were about close to tears. 

Gone.  No computer would read the external drive. So now we were without any of our information.  A double-crashing, as it were.  Devastating!

We typically do not write articles about products unless we're doing a comparison report.  But we are pleased to announce that by simply downloading TestDisk.com's program on to our pc, we plugged the external drive in, and after 28 hours of studying and scanning the drive - we were able to recover 98 percent of our files!

Lesson learned - to be honest, we're not sure. We are actually contemplating the use of the cloud as a secondary back-up.  We are learning how to take additional steps to protect and preserve information so this doesn't happen again. 

No client materials or information were lost or compromised during this disaster. No work had to stop and no clients even knew that behind the scenes we were sweating it.  That's great customer care, wouldn't you say?