I seem to get tons of mail from people with hard drive crashes wanting to know how to save their files. Starting with my days as a network geek, I have more experience with this stuff than I care to remember. It’s no fun to lose your data. The most recent posting was someone who had a hard drive failure after it was manhandled by airport security. The only drives I’m willing to put at risk in an airport are the one inside my various portable music players. The rest of my data is just too valuable. On principle, I recommend traveling with any external data stored on CompactFlash or SD cards, simply because solid state storage is less susceptible to damage. Of course if your drive is a casualty of a fall, there are steps you can take to recover the information, even if the drive is no longer reliable. Just don’t panic and don’t run CHKDSK. Follow some tried and true steps to recover data from your hard drive.