Lots of Discussion on Handling Fried Hard Drives

It used to be that journalists like The Station did our research, talked to a few sources, then wrote and filed our stories — and that pretty much was the end of our relationship with that particular story. We’d simply move on to the next assignment. Not so any more!

Thanks to useful new Web 2.0 features — such as interactive comment (which we use at the end of each story), polls, story ratings and number of hits (at the top of each story), audio and video reports, and so on — we’re getting into public conversations now that magnify greatly the value of these articles. It’s like an open source project: Someone gets it started, and then the community dives in with improvements and/or scorn. And we’re all the better for the additional information.

Thankfully, most of the time, comments on our stories are constructive and not troll-like. The trolls still hang out at Slashdot, apparently.

Anyway, we call your attention to this because we seem to have hit on a topic that affects a lot of folks: failed hard drives and how to rescue data when they die. If this has ever happened to you — and if it hasn’t, it will some day — you might be interested in what our readers are saying. Check in here if you have a few moments. We’d like to thank eWEEK readers for their excellent suggestions.