98.6% Back

Pin It The sound of hard plastic striking pavement alerted me to the fact; something had fallen from my computer bag while I was taking items from my car. I glanced down about my feet and at once noticed my Western Digital Notebook Drive lying on the spidery asphalt.

For just a moment, frustration reared its ugly head, but upon inspecting the drive, all appeared to be in good order. All was well, and all was good. I slipped the drive back into my computer bag—a little deeper than it had been—and headed off to start another day at work.

It was some hours later that evening that I found myself at home, indulging in a well-deserved dinner of spareribs and scones. I plugged in said drive to access a few photos I needed for a project. This was the best drive to use as it had every photo I’d ever taken on it. I moved to the microwave to retrieve my dinner and sat down at my computer. I glanced at the screen where a message had appeared:

The disk in drive F is not formatted.

Do you want to format it now?

A feeling of discouragement settled over me like a fine mist. I simply sat and stared at the screen.

Instead of boring you with a trove of details and whatnot—telling you about all the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth—as well as calls to data recovery experts who would charge somewhere between $75 - $225 to retrieve the data (provided that there were no problems, and a bit more than that if there were) let’s instead skip those two days, and go to straight the part where the good news starts leading up to the happy ending…

I was ready to accept my losses, or fork out hundreds of dollars when I suddenly remembered that I had an external drive on which I’d backed up my photos a year ago—it wasn’t up-to-date, but it had the files as they were back in the start of 2009—albeit missing the summer of summers, and all the moments therein—including all of the recent images on my photography website, and shots of my class this year as well.

However, this was far better than what I had before, which was a great, big, steaming pile of nothing.

That’s when I remembered this. Ah, this little technological gem which, after running for 21 hours straight, allowed me access to the last year of photos which I promptly copied over to a new, larger hard drive via two days and several hours of sorting and organizing.

It is now Saturday evening. ComedySportz is on the docket tonight and 98.6% of my files are back where they should be, nestled securely on a new hard drive which will be backed up on a regular basis from now on.

Okay, so I made that number up. In reality, I don’t really know to what percentage my system is; after all, some of the old files were damaged, and time will only tell until I know the full extent of the restoration. But I do know this, the new drive looks an awful lot like the old one, and for that I am grateful

Thank heavens for backups and computer geek programs.



By the way, do you think that this might be a good time for me to encourage you to make a backup of your treasured memories? Preferably sooner than later?

I thought I was going to throw up…

Pin It It is a beautiful Saturday and I was finishing my standard reports. I also was having some difficulty with my laptop. I decided to format the hard drive, and reinstall the operating system.

I hooked up my external hard drive and began to back up files. You know, my professional photos, all of the sixth grade photos for the graduation video, and all the video files for not only graduation, but for my classroom DVD as well. I also had a treasure trove of files on this external drive including my trip whitewater rafting last summer with my friend, Ron Firmage, and my classroom website.

In a few words, there was a HUGE amount of data stored on this drive

When I restarted my computer and made ready to format, I noticed a second “hard drive.” Now, why would I have that? When it was formatted before, was an extra partition created to simulate an additional hard drive? Well, that might possibly help explain just why my laptop was running rather slowly, and a few items wouldn’t install properly.


I decided to delete the partition, format the drive completely, and then reinstall Windows. As I deleted the partition for the “D” drive, my eyes suddenly fell on my external hard drive near my computer. That is when the horrible realization hit me…I had deleted the partition on my external hard drive!

Now, you may be unsure what a partition is…in an easy word, a hard drive is like a large, dark warehouse. All of the files you store are kept here. The partition is like an index, or database, where a map is kept which tells your computer where to find the files on the hard drive. Without the partition and index, the computer wanders into the “storeroom” and finds nothing there.

I had deleted the map.

I felt horribly sick. I dropped to my knees as the realization of what I’d done washed through me like a tidal wave of dread. I had just destroyed hundreds—possibly even thousands—hours of work.

I just stared at the screen.

I had completely destroyed the final copies of over five hundred “professional” photographs I’d taken, about five hours of raw video footage, and files I need for graduation this week.

Not knowing what else I could do, I did a search online and downloaded a program which claims that it can restore data which has been lost….the program has now been running for over five hours and has only analyzed about 17 percent of the drive.

I am hopeful though…

I hope I don’t throw up.