Just recently my 1T Maxtor external hard drive failed without warning and on it was all my photography from 2009. All my gigs all my festivals, private work and band promos all of it gone. So I thought, after much stress and tears I pointed in the direction of a company found via Google. Praise Google search engine.

I was lucky enough to find a company called Payam Data Recovery. They have just opened here in Brisbane but you can also find them in Sydney and Melbourne. I was also lucky to be charged a very reasonable amount to recover my lost data.

It took them 24 hours to find the problem for free and let me know how to proceed with recovery. I provided them a new external hard drive, a 1T Western Digital My Book and they copied over all my recovered data. So far so good and most of it seems to be there, the only issue was with my iMac’s Time Machine.

The most traumatic part of all of this was that my iMac became full and I decided to copy ALL of my 2009 data onto the external drive and removed it from the iMac completely. 3 days later the external failed and took my Time Machine with it, so I thought it was all gone to digital heaven. I’ve now learned my lesson to make multiple back ups and to now put my most valued data onto archival DVD [this is also not guarenteed, so make sure to check your DVDs and re-burn them after a few years]