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The only truism I have ever heard about backing up data is this:

Data loss is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when.

And I can’t put it better any other way. When you are faced with a mental list of what you had just lost right after your hard disk has boarded a direct flight to hell—photographs you’d just taken on a vacation, articles and clippings you’ve gathered over the years, along with documents containing snippets of ideas—data that have become indispensible, you will quickly realize that the extra money you should have spent on getting a spare hard disk solely for backups is nothing compared to the cost on the invoice you’d just received from the data recovery company.

Cost of a new hard disk = S$500 at best.

Cost of data recovery = S$1,800.

The look on my face = Priceless.

In the wake of the latest fiasco involving yet another Hitachi hard disk drive, I sought for the services of a data recovery company. Their response was nothing short of prompt, and I was left highly impressed; of course, for the price I had to pay, I was expecting to be.

The first thing I am going to do once I have sorted out this mess is to go buy an external hard disk solely for backups. In the past, my only backup practice was to copy files I deemed important off of my laptop and into an external hard disk whenever I remembered to. I also used this external hard disk as a working disk, meaning it was also a repository for files that I simply had no space for in my laptop, stuff like video files or batches of images that easily ran in the region of 60GB or so. In this regard, to have a backup disk as a working disk I carry around on me is anything but good practice. From now on, backup is backup, and working is working. Never shall the two usage mix again.

One for working files, to be lugged around on my person.

One for the repository of the original files of all the photographs I have ever taken (some of which I had already lost, marking a data gap between March 2006 to September 2006).

And one strictly for Time Machine, OS X’s built-in backup utility that backs up a Mac hourly for the past 24 hours, daily for the past month, and weekly until a backup disk is full.

As for the dead Hitachi returned to me by the data recovery company? I will stuff it up Hitachi’s CEO, into where the sun doesn’t shine. Oh, and since I still have the dead Hitachi hard disk from my Sony VAIO (now happily running a Toshiba hard disk, I am pleased to add), I will tear him a new bunghole with that.

Oh, throw in the CEO of Samsung as well. Two faulty hard disks from them… and counting.