How I recovered 100% of my data after my hard drive crash

Last week I explained why Carbonite couldn't come to my rescue after my hard drive crashed. At the end of the post, I promised to explain how I still managed to get 100% of my data back. So here goes...

For starters, and to be fair to Carbonite, most (but not all) of the data I restored came from my online Carbonite backup. This included the majority of my digital picture collection, my music collection and my older Word, Excel and other documents.

The next round of data came from a backup set on my HP Media Server. This backup set contained my entire collection of digital pictures and videos which I back up by hand every time I add new pictures or videos to my computer. With this I was able to restore all of my recent digital pictures not contained in my Carbonite backup and all of my videos. Whew!

I think a magic wand was involved

What remained was arguably the most important to my business. My data files contained in my Documents folders including such important files as my QuickBooks data file, my client time tracking documents and dozens of other mission-critical files. Yes, I realize much of this could have been stored in the cloud but hindsight is 20/20, right?

This is when I again turned to local computer repair company, Geek in Pink. Through some mystical processes I still only pretend to understand, they were able to recover all of my documents from my seemingly dead hard drive.

I should note that no one should ever rely on the last step I mentioned. There is no guarantee whatsoever that any computer repair company can recover all of your lost data. But boy when they do, you'll know for sure who is getting a giant fruit basket next Christmas!

So that's how I did it. Not the most routine data restoration process, but it worked. Thankfully.