With the recovery from Hurricane Sandy just now starting, the full scope of what has been lost is coming in to view. One of the many challenges you may have will be trying to recover the data on your damaged or destroyed laptop or desktop computer. If you are a Backblaze customer and need to restore your data, please see our Hurricane Sandy blog post for information and instructions on how to do so.

If you are not a customer of Backblaze or another online backup service, you are now faced with the task of trying to reassemble the photos, movies, documents, spreadsheets and more that were lost. If you still have a local backup, great, but just in case we’ve assembled a list of places you can look to attempt to recover some of your data. No one source will most likely have everything you want, but hopefully between these sources, you’ll be able to recover the data most important to you:

1. Shutterfly/Flickr/Picasa/Snapfish/Photobucket – Some of these services have been around for a long time. If you had accounts there and uploaded photos to them, they may be good places to retrieve some of your photos.
2. Physical media – Start with the Flash drives, SD cards, CDs and other media you may still have around. Include those you may have given to friends and relatives.
3. Physical devices – Check your digital camera, smartphones, etc. as they often contain images that you can restore.
4. Dropbox – If you are using a sharing/synching service such as Dropbox, some of your data may be there. How much data you find will depend on what you put there and your account limits.
5. Social Media – Facebook/Twitter/Google+/Tumblr/Pinterest/Youtube – If you uploaded lots of your favorite photos/videos, they should be recoverable from your posts. (Often you will not be able to recover the original, full-resolution version, but you can download a smaller size.)
6. iTunes – If you had iCloud or an iTunes account, the majority of your music library purchased from iTunes should be available to re-download.
7. Email attachments – This may sound like an odd one, but if you were an avid “attacher”, you may be able to recover documents, presentations, and photographs from either your own email attachments or from email you have sent to others.

If your machine was damaged, but you still have access to it, there are many data restoration companies that can try to recover data from damaged hard drives. Here are a few:

• Kroll Ontrack – http://www.krollontrack.com/data-recovery
• Secure Data Recovery – http://www.securedatarecovery.com
• Vantage Data Recovery – http://www.vantagetech.com
• Data Recovery Systems – http://datarecoverysystems.com
• SalvageData Recovery – http://www.salvagedata.com

(Backblaze is not affiliated with any of these organizations).

We hope this helps in recovering some of your lost data and memories.

Backblaze would like to extend our deepest sympathies to the people affected by Hurricane Sandy. We hope your recovery and return to any semblance of “normalcy” is swift.

Many of our customers are located in the areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy and thus many of you may need to recover lost data from our online backup service over the coming weeks. Our goal is to make that as easy and seamless as possible.

We have setup a dedicated email address for customers who lost data in Hurricane Sandy and need help recovering their data: sandy@backblaze.com (For everyone else and requests unrelated to restoring data, please contact the Backblaze Support team by visiting: help.backblaze.com and submit a support request or watch our restore tutorial video).

Additionally, while you can always download your data for free, if you are in the FEMA Disaster Declared Area (affected areas in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey) and need your data sent via FedEx on a USB Hard Drive or USB Flash Drive, we will provide a 50% discount on these services through the end of November. To use this discount, please order your data restore and email sandy@backblaze.com with your information to receive a 50% refund.

Again, our thoughts are with those impacted and hope your life can get back to normal quickly.

If you would like to make a donation to assist those affected by Hurricane Sandy, please contact the American Red Cross or donate to the relief organization of your choice.

Recently Yev, our resident keeper of the meme, asked our community to tell us their scariest stories on data loss. From the avalanche of bone chilling stories we picked 10 we thought would tingle your spine without scaring you breathless. Some folks had online backup, others did not, but all are scary. You’ve been warned, read on if you dare…(Insert sinister music here).

“I work as a graphic designer for a TV-Station. Some years ago, early in the morning (not my time), I thought it was a good idea to make some manual backups of my work. I started to transfer all of our onair designs and graphic elements to the backup drive. After a few minutes, I realized, that I was deleting them instead of moving. My face turned white and I was shocked. Thanks to a rescue software, I was able to recover nearly 80% of the files but I spent more than a day to rearrange the folder structure. That was the moment, I started to learn everything I could about backup solutions.” –Pascal

“I was doing my initial back up with just over 1TB of data, I went out for a couple of hours and came back to find that we’d had a power surge that pretty much fried my new back up drive and all of the drives in my pc… fortunately i had all my stuff backed up on a couple of smaller drives. but it was still the scariest moment in my life. feel much safer with backblaze!” –Ed

“Driving back from a beach in rural Nicaragua we were robbed by a highwayman. he had a tshirt over his face, and stuck a machete in my girlfriend’s face and demanded money. Sadly, we only had $6 which just made him angry. He demanded my backpack… which had my unbacked up computer. A sad day indeed.” –Dave

“It was in a time before I knew of BackBlaze. In my times of PC repair and troubleshooting. A frantic user enters and is clearly distraught. A flash drive is practically thrown my way, in pieces… I do my best to see if there is anything I can do, but we both know how this is going to end. As I go to tell her the bad news, tears begin to gush as she realizes the gravity of loosing……. her dissertation. All the time she’d spent. All the research. Hundreds of pages. Tens of thousands of words. No backup. Gone.” –Joshua

“I use TimeMachine and Backblaze on my MacBook Pro. Back in August, after upgrading to Mountain Lion, my MacBook started crashing sporadically. During these crashes that got more frequent within one week, my TimeMachine backup went corrupt, and then within another day, it crashed for good and my computer wouldn’t even boot up. Fortunately, Backblaze had me covered and 300 GB of data saved for me. Without that, I would be in very sad shape… Now the thought of that is scary ” –Jared

“I was talked into being the wedding photographer for my sister-in-law’s wedding. After shooting the wedding I uploaded the photos to my main harddrive. I had an external drive that was set to backup my files nightly. I then formatted my memory cards because I had another shoot to do on Sunday. When I can home from work Monday evening I could hear a loud sound from down the hall. As soon as I entered my office I knew the harddrive was toast. The logic board had fried and it had been spinning as max RPM all day. The head had impacted the disks and it was beyond saving. I went to my backup drive, and to my horror my data had not been backing up properly for weeks. I had to tell my sister-in-law that her wedding pictures were lost forever. I now have BackBlaze do my backups automatically for me. I will never have to make THAT phone call again.” –David

“I once lost 60GB of photos because my laptop hard drive died. The saddest part is that I decided to delete my backup an hour earlier to free up space for a large file transfer. After the transfer I was going to re-backup my photos. During the data transfer my laptop hard drive died. I never saw those photos again.” –Ryan

“My almost data loss story happened yesterday when a full glass of water fell on my laptop! I was almost crazy because I could not lose my data and I had no backup of everything. But after I calmed down, grabbed a dryer and after a lot of failed attempts finally started my laptop.” –Francisco

“I wanted to reinstall the operating system on my Macbook Pro once, so I backed all my data to an external harddrive, wiped the laptop clean, reinstalled the OS, and went to reimport my data. Unexpectedly, the reimport step wasn’t working correctly, and my data was floating on an external, unable to get back onto my laptop. Thankfully my friends and I found a fix, but my heart stopped for a few minutes when I was panicking over whether I’d need a new OS or a new laptop, and how long it would take before I could see my files again.”
-Elaina

“Nearly one year ago I was awoken suddenly from a deep sleep by a creaking sound downstairs. I often hear our cats rustle about the house, but this sound was distinctly different as though there was a larger movement. I’m usually the one checking on weird sounds for my wife just to reassure her that everything’s okay. But this sound didn’t awake her, and it had me a little startled. It was dark in the house, except for a halloween moonlight that peeked it’s way through a skylight. I slowly made my way downstairs to investigate. My heart was pounding — I gripped tightly on the banister. A few steps from the bottom, I heard the sound again, this time more pronounced. I froze in my tracks, not knowing whether to shout out in fear or sneak even more carefully. Finally I reached the bottom and rounded the corner to peer into the front room of our house. There in the moonlight was a large figure, human-like yet monstrously tall and wide. It was wearing a black jacket and a black mask. It was twice my size. I didn’t move, and I couldn’t move. Suddenly the figure spoke, and it said, ‘I’m taking this.’ I saw it had our family PC in it’s arms with the power cord hanging down to the ground. ‘Just let me leave, and there will be no trouble,’ the figure continued in a deep, determined voice. I stepped back and let the figure leave — I just wanted the situation to end without incident. Out the figure went, PC in hand, all my life’s data with it. For a moment I panicked, called 911, and scrambled to check doors and windows throughout the house. But then I stopped to gather my thoughts and take a deep breath. I realized in that moment that I was safe, my family was safe, and who cares about a little old PC. All the data was safe with Backblaze.” –Paul

New ultrabook design decisions limit data recovery options
When my girlfriend recently dropped (and killed) her new ultrabook, I found out the Solid State Drive (SSD) inside of it was not easily removable like the old hard drives always were. This means a dead laptop = completely lost data if you aren’t fully backed up. Now don’t get me wrong, storing my valuable data on precariously spinning platters inside laptop hard drives has always worried me. Even before I co-founded an online backup company, I’d wince when a friend dropped a laptop roughly on a desk or spun the laptop around with a fast nudge so others could see the screen. So as soon as I could, I moved over to using SSDs that contain no moving parts. The new SSDs are more reliable than the old spinning platters overall, but the current designs cause catastrophic failure modes that will result in MORE data loss in many situations.

Continue reading…

No, I am not kidding. Apparently two researchers that had been working on a cure for prostate cancer had all their data on a laptop. While they stopped quickly on the way to their lab, a thief stole the laptop out of their parked car.

And, yes, I hate to say it: they had no backup.

Being in the online backup business, I hear about stories of data loss all the time. But some are just more painful to hear than others.

If you happen to live near Oklahoma City, and have any suggestions on finding the laptop, the researchers are offering a no-questions-asked reward of $1000.

Deloitte published the results of it’s fifth “State of the Media Democracy“, which shares the results of a poll of about 2,000 American consumers. While there are a number of interesting results from the survey that demonstrate the increase in smartphones and continued viewing of TV and reading of magazines, here is a stat that might be shocking to those who backup their data:

51 percent of Americans have experienced a computer or hard drive failure that caused them to lose photos, movies, or other digital content.

That is over 100 million people that have lost data they have created! Considering the availability of easy and inexpensive unlimited backup solutions such as Backblaze, no one should ever lose data as a result of a hard drive failure.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I noticed the following tweet from @DigitalRoyalty:

My friend’s laptop was stolen. He tracked the thief via @Backblaze for weeks & finally identified him on Facebook & Twitter. Digital 007.

I know our online backup service saves user data every day, but physical theft recovery? That certainly caught my attention and I asked for the whole story. The friend who had their laptop stolen, Mat Miller, replied:

I received a DM from @DigitalRoyalty that you were interested in hearing the story of how I identified the thief of my computer using Backblaze, here goes:

I was in LA on a work trip and my laptop was stolen from the trunk of my car. Bummed out for sure but o’well at least my data was safe! I was insanely busy over the next week so I was logging in to the dashboard and grabbing files as I needed them. Then, about 4 days after the computer was stolen, I saw that a new user had been created on my computer.

The name was “jack”. I clicked on the folder and noticed that the thief had failed to remove the Backblaze program from applications and his files were being uploaded! On the first day I had a picture but nothing else (wait for it Miller).

A few weeks went by with no specific details to nail him on (I must admit everyday was quite exciting) until last Friday. He added a college paper on his desktop with his full name. I googled his name and came up with his Twitter and FaceBook pages!

I’ve filed a report with the LAPD as of today so we’ll see how this pans out. Backblaze is amazing!!!

Mat Miller

Wow. Nice sleuthing Mat, thanks for telling us about it, and hope you get your laptop!

Have you upgraded to Snow Leopard? Users on Apple’s forums are reporting a bug that deletes all user data if someone mistakenly logs into the “Guest” account. This issue was originally reported about a month ago on Cnet’s MacFixIt but today is being mentioned across the web as more people are being bitten by the bug.

While not completely reproducible, it is happening frequently enough to take a basic action: turn off the guest account.

eHow explains how to turn off the guest account – it’s quick and takes just a minute.

Of course, you should also make sure your data is backed up, but I assume you already use Backblaze to do this.