How To Screw Up a Good Backup System

I back up our family computers like crazy, using a combination of Time Machine and cloud backup via Backblaze. But I did something dumb and almost lost our family’s entire history of home videos. Facing estimates of $500 – $1500 for professional data recovery, I stumbled on an awesome hack that saved the day.

Background

All of our computers’ internal hard drives get a dedicated external Time Machine, and we use Backblaze for extra insurance, so our data is safe in the cloud in case of fire, theft or flood. But we also have a few external hard drives that store things like large music collections and our home videos. The external drives back up to Backblaze only (no Time Machine).

All of that has been working hunky dory for years, and I felt confident we were safe. Then, a week ago, I realized that the drive that stores our family videos (“Gorgonzola”) would no longer mount, with any cable, on any of our machines. Yikes! So I turned to Backblaze for a restore, only to find it wasn’t showing up there either! Double yikes, freakout.

What Happened

At some point in the distant past, I did something dumb, though I didn’t realize it was dumb at the time – I realized I had lots of extra space on Gorgonzola and decided to let that drive do double-duty, as a Time Machine drive for a laptop. What I didn’t take into account was the fact that Backblaze has a reasonable rule – they don’t back up your backups. So when Backblaze detected that Gorgonzola was now a Time Machine drive, it dropped it from the manifest. I never noticed it had been dropped.

So now I’d realized that I had NO backup available anywhere for this precious, unreplaceable data. So I called some data recovery services, and got estimates ranging from $500 – $1500. The data was important enough to me that I’d pay that ransom, if it came to it. But of course I didn’t want to.

So Crazy It Just Might Work

The next day, I stumbled on a brilliant suggestion: Often, when a drive won’t mount, it’s because the USB controller circuit board inside the drive case has gone south, and that the drive itself is fine. Solution: Purchase an identical drive, take them both apart, and swap the controller chips. Brilliant! Found an identical drive on Amazon for $100 (Seagate Backup Plus Slim), and went for it.

Prying the case open and removing the drives turned out to be easier than expected (YouTube video), and the controller chips slipped off easily. Quick swaperoo, and lo and behold, it worked! Gorgonzola showed up as normal, and I’m rescuing my data right now. Of course, both drives were destroyed in the process, but at this point, I don’t care.

Yay, internet.

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