Sunday, March 7, 2010

I Hate Computers: My Enemy Strikes!

Remember how I said I knew my enemy was waiting for the proper moment to strike and destroy my data?

It struck hard.

On Friday afternoon, I plugged a USB hard drive in and only got the "clunk of death" from it: every farking thing on that one is gone, so now I'm two drives down.

The first drive--the main one--had all my photos, including all the pics I've taken of the X-11 from day one. Lots of fort stuff. I had most of it backed up--but only up to May of 2008.

My book got wiped out yet again--a piece of urban fantasy, had a lot of ideas for it, and this wasn't the first time it got wiped out.

The second drive had MP3's and books, including a huge amount of NASA stuff on the Apollo, Merc and Gemini missions. These two projects are mostly recoverable; I was trying to organize nearly 80 CD's worth of music and 15 CD's worth of books into single libraries, eliminating duplicates. Got to start over, now. There were also some movie-making projects and a lot of software.

The bitch of it is that I was planning on running backups of every drive to DVD's over the weekend.

The good news? Yes, there is some. I managed to rescue some old Thunderbird email folders and plug them into Thunderbird. Had a registration key for the "Back2Life" file recovery program--the same one I used the last time I had to recover from a big crash. You buy the program once and get free upgrades for life!

Since getting the upgrade installed, I've recovered 20gb worth of "My Documents" archives (all more than 2 years old, but dating back nearly 20 years), including one very pleasant surprise: a copy of a National Park Service reference book on Fort Jefferson, complete with illustrations. That alone is worth the $30 for that recovery program.

AND...my book, complete, turned up like a bad penny. Part of one of the movie projects. Some recorded notes.

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