All your souvenirs are on a crashed HD, what do you do?

[samueladam]

A desperate mum's hard disk loaded with her son's pictures makes more noise than a faulty motherboard.

It sounds really bad : http://samueladam.net/_uploads/hdsound.ogg

To all HD recovery cracks, it would be nice to have your opinion and your general advices on what to do, where to go with an apparently dead HD to expect a miracle.

The first one who talks about backups will be downmodded. ;)

[stuartcw]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinRite

[jrockway]

The first one who talks about backups will be downmodded.

You're too lazy to solve the problem the obvious way, so you're going to downmod people that remind you to Never Let This Happen Again?

[samueladam → jrockway]

The topic is about recovering from a crashed HD, and it was an humorous way to keep the comments focused. Relax, I won't down mod you (it's impossible).

Of course, a backup is the best solution, but it doesn't bring data back to tell someone "You should have ...".