If there's one thing to remember of my meeting today with the folks at Seagate's Recovery Services is, to BACKUP our data! Obviously, it's not the first (and the last) time you hear a hard disk drive company recommend to buy another drive to backup the one you just bought!

But my visit to Seagate's lab manager, Vu Ho, (pictured) who's team recovers lost data from hard disks and flash memories sent by customers all over the country, was simply eye opening.

You think I'm paranoid? Well, read along and I promise you'll change your mind :)

To get started, how much do you think it will cost to recover that damaged "un-backed" hard drive with all the "priceless" photos, videos, etc...? Well... a LOT more than you think!

It will cost $500 to $1,000 if it's a logical failure. About $1,500 to $2,000 if it's a physical one and we have to open up the drive", said Kevin Payne, Director of marketing at Seagate.

On Amazon, I found a 2 Terabytes (TB) Western Digital drive at $550 that will probably be enough to save all your past data and probably the new ones, for some time to come. Of course, you might not necessarily need that much and perhaps a 1 TB (~$230) or even a 500 GB drive (~$120) would do. But the only goal to this exercise is to put things into perspective: backup is CHEAP!

Another thing I will recommend, after you bought that extra drive and transferred all the data to it, is to think of subscribing to an online storage/backup service. Seagate has one (Evault), but so does Symantec, EMC, AOL/Xdrive, Iomega and start-up eFolder, to just name a few. Cost varies. Xdrive gives 5 GB for free and EMC only charges $5 per month and per computer for unlimited backup. Can't beat that!

DIY... OK... but don't ever open the drive cover
In the video below, Seagate's lab manager Vu admits to have about 80% success rate in recovering the data. Usually, it's unrecoverable if the disk head crashed on the surface and it's still plugged-in, making things worse. So Vu's advice is: if you hear your hard disk "click"... then stop it! It's probably because it's not spinning anymore. And don't try to open the drive's case yourself or you'll halved the chances to recover the data. In case the problem is a "logical error" meaning the OS can not see the file although its there, then you might try to recover the data yourself with some of the available utilities like chkdsk, disk utility for the Mac or a utility fromStellar Info, for example.

Take good care of your drive!
Vu also recommends to really take good care of the drive: don't bang it hard on the table to avoid impact, unmount/eject the drive before you unplugged it and make sure the drive doesn't go too hot.

On the video, Vu also explains that technicians usually work on multiple cases at a time, around 4-5. It takes about a work week to recover the data, that is then ship back on a complementary external drive.