Categories: hardware | photography | technology
My worst fears confirmed: I know enough about my computer to be dangerous, and not enough to protect myself from fuck-ups.
When my dear brother bought me this laptop for Christmas, he bought it with the standard 40GB hard drive, which has proven patently inadequate for me and my purposes. So I have an external drive, to which I periodically back up my user folder. I was always kind of leery of trusting that process, though, so I didn't delete much from my main hard drive.... until it just got WAY too full to avoid it anymore.
So last week I carefully backed up my user folder, making sure that all the photos I've taken recently, and all my beloved photos from the past, were saved. And I started deleting things from my laptop hard drive. I deleted all photos from prior to 2006, and managed to buy myself a bit of space. But then today my hard drive was once again so full that it actually couldn't even open new programs, so I decided to do another backup (better safe than sorry) and start being even more vicious with my deleting of stuff.
But something went wrong, and after my backup this morning, what I am left with is a carbon copy of my CURRENT user folder... and nothing else. In other words, everything that I have deleted in the past week (LOTS of old photos, mostly) is gone. Just gone.
OMG WTF. BBQ, even. I'm distressed! I mean, I won't die – I do have enough perspective to know that it's not the END of the world – but it sure sucks. I only really started using Flickr last September, so anything that pre-dates that, or that I didn't post to Flickr (save a few things I do have saved on CD) is gone. Which sucks.
Makes me wonder yet again about the long-term problems of data storage. If I'm overwhelmed by it now, only a couple of years into owning a digital camera, then I'm not quite sure where I'll be in 20 years? Drowning in data, if I don't figure this stuff out. And in the meantime, I'm reliant on my increasingly poor memory to remind me of my colourful past.
Lessons in non-attachment. Dammit.
that sucks
Fri, 2006-07-14 16:12 — Ivan Storck (not verified)I just bought a new external hard drive and am trying out a free program called carbon copy. What were you using? I actually now have two external hard drives, one for the carbon copy, and one for the archives.. i hope that works!
!
Fri, 2006-07-14 17:42 — Patty Foster (not verified)Argh! That's terrible! I've just started going digital too, but I still do print outs of my fave photos as backups. I still can't bring myself to trust digital storage.
Your lost data.
Sat, 2006-07-15 04:11 — G r e g g (not verified)Norton Utilites File Recover or Unerase Wizard can usually retrieve data from recent deleting/emptying the trash.
This link provides some promising solutions:
http://www.aumha.org/a/recover.php
Ask around. You may well be able to save some photos form your 40 Gb. Don't empty the trash anymore until you do though.
Best,
G
a home server
Sun, 2006-07-16 15:56 — kevin (not verified)after a while i think the only solution becomes getting an old desktop computer and turning it into a network attached storage server with at least a pair of drives in raid-1.
it seems like overkill initially, but for the amount you will backup and the costs, it starts to make sense. especially when you consider that no only is your laptop short on capacity, but as a laptop it is much more susceptible to damage or theft and it is better to keep the databack at home and readily available.
another upside of it being network attached is that the data is available to you wirelessly, so you don't always have to attached to your external drive to get data from it.
Ouch!!
Thu, 2006-07-27 18:43 — Chris (not verified)I have the same thing happen once to all my photos. Luckily though I was able to recover them using Norton File Recover and Ontrack Easy recovery professional. I now have an interanl DVD Burner, so every month I burn all my photos and anything else I think is really that important. Hopefully you can recover your files to.