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 2^nd 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...