Tech No File

Last weekend, my laptop experienced a heart attack.  I immediately applied the paddles, in the form of Restore and Repair.  It was on life support all through the night and into the next day.  I feared the worst so off to Best Buy I went and came home with Big Dog Dell.

Oddly enough, a few days before I had the thought that the next computer I bought should be a desktop.  Hmmm.  Universe warning me?

I carted the Big Dog into the house and found that my laptop came out of its coma.  Well, sh*t.  I decided to keep Big Dog as it would take me further into the future when I won’t have the income readily available.  Living in a three-story house where all the computers are on the third floor. . . well it would be nice to have one on floor one.  We have a tablet, but it doesn’t like me very much so the laptop would be handy-dandy.

Big Dog sits proudly on my desk.  It has enough ports and slots that I could connect the entire house should I choose.  It could probably power it too, but lest I get carried away I started with the simple things.  It ran through the usual I-must-update-from-my-factory-settings-for-an-hour and then it was my turn.  I loaded up the anti-terrorist/hacking/viral/socialranting software.  Printer.  Office 365.  And then it was recommended to set up a recovery drive.  I thought that was a good idea since I just experienced the cardiac event.

It was then I made the classic rookie mistake.

The available drives were: C: which everyone knows is the hard drive where all the working stuff lives, so don’t touch it; Seagate Hard Drive – an external drive that I keep photos, music and various documents in case the C: croaks; and then it listed F: with some name I never heard of.  Okay, that’s the place to put the recovery drive.  So I selected it and it said it would delete all files on it.  Well, since it wasn’t something I knew about I figured there shouldn’t be anything there.  Right?

As soon as it started, the Seagate disappeared.  F*ck.  I cancelled the process and checked the Seagate.  Every last mother-f*cking file was gone.  Double F.*.C.K.  I decided that I would not beat myself up for such a colossally stupid mistake.  Surely to God there is a way to recover the files.  By now, all you techies out there are alternately laughing yourselves silly and shaking your head in sympathy.  I wish you had been there to help.  I unplugged said destroyed black box of death and loaded up the internet.  I landed on the EaseUS website and they indeed had a recovery utility tool that could suck files from the bowels of death.  I paid the 70 bucks and downloaded the program.

They weren’t kidding.  It ran the initial scan and recovered FAT tables and such.  Okay. Then it went into “Deep Scan” and hit the motherlode.  Ten Thousand – yes that is 10,000 – files later it finished.  OMFG.  I had that much crap?!  It’s going to take a few weeks to get through all that.

I’ve said it many times, and at times with my teeth clenched, that the Universe will deliver us a good solid whack on the head when we need it.  Good things are coming out of this little death.  Several months ago, I uploaded photos and music to the Great Hard Drive In The Sky as a secondary backup.  That was the first place I looked to recover files.  And discovered that not everything had uploaded.  Lesson 1 – if you save something somewhere, close out and go back and check to make sure it is there.  Lesson 2 – if you save stuff either to your C:, the Drive in the Sky, flash drive, CD (yes they still exist), SIM card, external drive or a folder in your desk, look in those places at least once a year and pitch the sh*t that is no longer relevant to your life.  You will be happy you did, unless you really want to view those 10,000 restored files.  As I started opening each of the files that had been in the bowels of the Seagate, I found that a good portion of them just needed to be flushed away.  Into the trash bin they went.

I have to look at all the music and photos I saved, both from the recovery and from the Drive In The Sky, and decide what to keep and make sure I save them in both places.  It feels pretty good, actually.  Near death experiences do that to you.  Help you get a perspective on what you want, need and want to maintain.

I’m going to put a sticky note on the Big Dog to remind myself to clean out my stored crap once a year.  Especially those really awful pictures.  You know the kind I’m talking about.