Power outage and external harddrive broken:(

[ibear]

there was a power outage at my home this afternoon, and when the power came back, my external hard drive no longer works!

i had all my computer related stuff plugged into an APC Surge Protector. so i don't know if the surge protector failed to protect at the time. But the protector still works right now (or at least looks like working). Anyway, I contacted APC and they said they will send me a new unit of the surge protector and ask me to send my old one back for them to inspect. after that, they can decide it's the protector's fault or not.

I have so many data on the hard drive, and i can't even remember what are they. :(

my question is: 1. should i continue to use the current surge protector?
2. what happens when you return your hard drive to the hard drive company. will they destroy all the data? how is your privacy protected in this process? i have read in the news that people bought a hard drive (maybe refurbished) and found all the data that belongs to the previous owner or something like that. if this is the case, i would just buy a new one and destroy the bad one myself.

thanks for any input.

[Kasakato]

Does it spin up? Try dis connecting it and re connecting it. Its unlikely a power surge protector caused this.

[woof]

If it was just a plain surge protector without battery backup then I'm not surprised. A surge protector really only protects if the voltage spikes up. If the voltage spikes down (power failure) there's nothing it can do about that since sudden power failures can have a series of sudden jagged up and down spikes before the power goes off completely. A battery backup system would switch over to battery power when this starts to happen.

Sensitive data on a hard drive should always be encrypted so in situations where a defective hard drive has to be sent back you won't have to worry. And that category of sensitive data that should be encrypted includes those home movies of you and the girlfriend.

[ibear]

Does it spin up? Try dis connecting it and re connecting it. Its unlikely a power surge protector caused this.

it spinned up at first, but my computer won't recognize it. then i tried one more time and it won't spin up any more

[Kwirky]

Hard drive companies include a disclaimer that they take no liability for the data on there - if you return it under warranty, they will ship you out a new, blank drive & your data will be forever gone. If you're serious about getting that data back, get the drive to a data recovery company.