just an old-fashioned girl

Hello and welcome. I'm glad you dropped by. If you´re looking for something a little nostalgic of bygone eras with a timeless elegance and a little modern twist – in other words, something slightly “retro” – then you should feel right at home here in my shabby chic room. Month by month, there will always be something new to see so I hope you´ll enjoy your stay and come back again soon.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Recovering

For the past week I´ve been recovering in more ways than one. For a start, by sheer coincidence, while I was updating my registry cleaner I discovered a free software download which recovers lost data. A cause for rejoicing? Well, yes and no. Yes, it did recover some of my lost work but a deep scan took 7 hours, and no wonder, because it found literally 100s of 1000s of images! On the face of it that sounds positive but only a small percentage show thumbnails which doesn´t necessarily mean that these files are still recoverable. All it means is that those without thumbnails are almost definitely, but not always, duds..... Also, of those showing thumbnails, there were literally dozens of duplicates scattered all over the place and not necessarily within the same clusters and sometimes wrongly named so every single image had to be viewed and, if of any value, ticked. Here´s a typical screen shot. See how far the slider´s got to? That was after about an hour.


After I´d viewed several thousand, I´d forgotten which I´d already chosen for recovery as a result of which, after the first scan alone, I had many MANY duplicates as the programme doesn´t ask Are you quite sure you really want a dozen of that? After about 8 hours of ticking boxes my back hurt, my head hurt and I felt as if I was well past my live by date...so I downloaded what I´d recovered onto a USB stick and then stopped for the day. That´s when I realised I had a major problem. After all that tedious work the slider had only moved down a tiny fraction and I still had 100s of 1000s of files to examine. I could just have left the computer running all night and resumed my hunt the following morning but for the fact that I´d have had to uncheck every single box or I´d have got all those 1000s of images added on again the next time. Unthinkable. I reluctantly had to close the programme, start it up again and leave it on to scan again all night. I thought if I marked the spot at the side of my screen to show how far the slider had reached I could at least spare myself the task of ploughing through all the images I already had. Ha! I could have saved myself the trouble as I found next day that the images were in an entirely different order after the 2nd scan. And so it went on...every day for a week until I got so thoroughly sick of it I reluctantly had to stop before I lapsed into a coma, and accept the fact that there were probably – almost certainly – many images I´d be abandoning and sending to oblivion. As I said before, I´m recovering in more ways than one. And I´m still not finished. I´ve only scanned once for documents of which there are even more duplicates. The horror of that is that all the duplicates have to be recovered because some are viable and others aren´t. Why this should be totally defeats me but then I find it equally absurd that the programme includes unrecoverable files at all. But after that comes the fun part – I don´t think - which is sorting everything out into folders and transferring them to my computer.

It´s a great pity that I never found a trace of the kit I was working on when my computer went belly up. Also, I never found the freebie I´d intended as an add on to Garden Treasures so I´ve created another one. Here it is:


If you´d like it, you´ll find it HERE.

I´m off now to recover. Well, sort of. After that major marathon even housework and ironing have their charms...

6 comments:

  1. UGH! Bless your heart! I can't even imagine how tedious and brain-busting this process is for you but I know you wouldn't sleep at night if there was any chance you could recover some of your lost files. I hope it's all over soon.

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  2. Your experience has made me a tiny bit wiser, I am getting an external hard drive to back up my work files, my client is bringing it to me today. I also figure if something ever happened to me, my hubby can just give the external hard drive to my client, and wouldn't have the head-ache of try to figure out which files are his from my hard drive. I am sorry you are going through this process of recovery, at least you are able to recover some of your files. I know it's alot of work, but it will be worth it in the end. I'm thinking about you. Hugs.

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  3. ps. Thank you for the lovely butterfly. I just downloaded it. :)

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  4. What a nightmare on one hand, on the other all is not lost as before. You must have a blazing headache from going through all this! Hugs.

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  5. So glad you are getting to recover at least some of what was thought totally lost. I see Deb suggested an external. I had one 500 GB external practically full of just Digital kits and my photos. But I also backed them up on CDs and DVDs as externals aren't as likely to crash as a hard drive, but they can crash. I got a Tera bite EH a while back and got all my scrapbook and photos file moved to it and it works so much faster having that extra space. I plan to set up my 500 for a daily backup of my hard drive. And knowing me I will still back it up on DVDs, too.

    One day at a time and someday it will all be done...hang in there!

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  6. SO sorry to read your troubles but at the same time I'm glad you managed to salvage some.Is there a cleanup option within the program, so that you can more easily see the doubles or even give probability of recovery? (Even size would give an indication of bigger is more complete)

    SO am going to put everything on DVD'S! I have a 2 terabyte drive almost full, with scrapstuff, genealogy research and pictures. Already have a brand new stack of dvd's and as soon as I have my drive organized, every last little thing is going to DVD, and every folder gets a burnfolder in it with the "new stuff since last burn" with a once a month back up.

    Hope that you find a lot more things intact. I'm thinking about you.
    Hugs!

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