Tell me you've done it too... PLEASE

Hi everybody--

I need some big time reasurance here. I spent the last 36 hours throwing a major 2 year old hissy fit and I need to know that somebody has done this too... probably not to the same degree, but at least that somebody has at some point done this.

Here's the story. Two nights ago I was using my Powerbook, which I frequently use on my couch, while I was watching TV which I normally do. (I also tend to use my laptop while using the potty--also something which I normally do--but that's neither here nor there.) But when I woke up yesterday, I noticed that a huge folder (yes, huge, about 20-30 Gigabytes to be exact) I had on my desktop was gone.

At some point the night before, I must have dosed off and all I can think of, is that I deleted this huge folder. I also have a tendancy of keeping things organized and clean, so I probably unknowingly emptied my trash before I went to bed, but I can't quite remember doing so. I checked with my wife, who also shares my computer, and she wasn't sure if she may have done it--but by no means am I blaming her.

But here's the problem. I never backed the folder up on my brand new 250GB external harddrive. I mean, forcryingoutloud, I bought the damn thing to back up THIS PARTICULAR FOLDER, but never got around to actually doing so.

Once I realized it was gone, I shut my Powerbook off and took it into a computer tech shop who tried (unsucessfully) to recover the data. Everything that was retrieved was "corrupt".

Please tell me somebody here in "Internet-land" has erased something very important before my head explodes. Also, if you have any other options, please let me know. Feel free to share your story here and you'll get all the sincere sympathy you want from me.

Thanks for letting me vent.
Greg

PS: I'm going to purchase another back-up external harddrive and from now on I will be backing up all my files from here on out and then re-backing them up on the soon-to-be-purchased harddrive.

MBHockey said:

Yup. I've done this...with a project that took me 45 hours on the computer to get halfway through. ARGGGHHHH

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I only wish it was 45 hours of work. This was stuff that I had been working on since AUGUST with--at the very least--5 hours/a day worth of work.

I've been praying and swearing to God since it happened and this afternoon I apologized to God for all the nasty things I've said. Sure enough, about an hour later, something told me to go check this cardboard box that I had in my closet that I haven't touched in 2 months. I found a couple DVD's that contained the most important files I deleted. It wasn't everything, considering I lost about 30 GB worth of data, but at least I found something.

EDITED: for grammer reasons

CanadaRAM said:

I kinda hate to mention it, but have you done a search for the folder or some unique names of the items in it? Most of the time when a client 'loses' something and calls me, it turns out they have inadvertently dragged and dropped it into another folder, where it is hiding. Easy to do with a trackpad.

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I was in panic mode when it happened so I didn't do that before I handed my Powerbook over to the disaster recovery techs. I just did a "Find All" search (running OS10.3.9 so I don't have Spotlight) for a couple of the files that I could remember the names to and I got nuthin.

Sonuvabiatch.

aquajet said:

Better tell the wife to get some old rags ready for the bloody mess.

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Oooh yeah, I'm about to go "Postal", ifyaknowwhatimean.

MBHockey said:

Yup. I've done this...with a project that took me 45 hours on the computer to get halfway through. ARGGGHHHH

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...but, yes, I very sympathetic with all the work and time that is lost. I just sucks. Do you find that when you re-do stuff, is it better? the same? or worse? than the first time through. I've always wondered what people think.

As long as time is not a constraint, I've felt that I've done the same quality if not slightly better... but like I said when time isn't a factor, otherwise it's just about always worse.

tweakers_suck said:

Yes, unfortunately. I lost pics of my son when he was very young. My wife was pissed-off at me for that.

You'll get over it. But backup, backup, backup. I learned my lesson. In fact -- I'm going to do a backup now.

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I've got wedding picture and honeymoon pictures on my harddrive, but luckily I didn't lose those... the wife would have been pissed!!! However, I did lose a lot of very important pictures.

yg17 said:

Well just this evening, I had to reformat my G5, so I made a disk image of my home directory (which had a ton of pictures and other stuff on it) and copied the disk image over to my other hard drive. Upon finishing the reinstallation of OSX, I tried to restore the image, and it was corrupt! Nothing was salvageable...no idea WTF happened. I was able to recover some things with recovery software, but many, many pictures are gone. My data files for my checkbook balancing software...gone. Firefox bookmarks...gone. Fortunatley my school documents are synced to my Powerbook so I still have those at least (or else I'd truly be f**ked)

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Good luck, I hope you find most of it. How does stuff become "corrupt" anyway. 95% of the stuff that the recovery guys were able to retrieve was corrupt. Would it have been corrupt when I worked on it and saved it? Or did it become this way when I moved the files to the trash and then emptied the trash?

The tech that tried to recover the files also mentioned that Macs are notorious for making it more difficult to retrieve deleted data as opposed to PC machines. It had something to do with how the computer names the file when it does an auto-save or something... I dunno.

Again, hope everything works out for ya. I'm not much of a computer guy when it comes to the nit-n-gritty stuff of the machine. I kind of do a lot of stuff blindly and hope to God it works. This is one of the main reasons why I bought a Mac so I could avoid a lot of this type of stuff.

balamw said:

Friday afternoon after 4 is also a bad time to attempt major housekeeping. I lost about 14 months of work when I decided to "re-organize" my work computer one Friday afternoon.

We had just switched from Novell to Windows NT servers and I wanted my "profile" to be the one from the new domain controller. Essentially I did the operations in the wrong order and managed to wipe out my entire, not backed up, documents folder.

Fortunately I still kept my e-mail outside that folder, so I could recover many crucial files from e-mail.

B

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Oooh, 14 months is a lot of work to lose. I'm crushed that I lost about 5-6 months of work (granted it was based on projects I had done the previous 4 years), but losing anything remotely important on simple error is so agrivating.

Ironically, the hospital where my wife works just switched from Windows NT to Novell... but the IT staff was responsible for transfering all data.

ChrisA said:

When you empty the trash the data are not realy erased all that happens is that the space used to hold the data is added to the list of "free space" that can be used to store new data. So now let's say the system decides to write another line to some log file. It gets a small piece of space off the free list and uses it. Well that free space is where your lost JPG image is and now that 4MB image has 200 bytes of log file in the middle of it. Makeing it "Corrupt"

What the data recovery software does is scan the free space list looking for stuff that it knows about, like the header on a JPG file.

A true data recovery expert could recover that "corrupt" JPJ file except for the part that was physically overwritten but these guys make a lot of money per hour and the going very slow. There are outfits that can disassemble a drive in a cleanroon and pull the data off the platters.

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How much "free space" would, say my 15" AlBook have? I also heard that just having your computer on--without even doing anything--can write over that free space. Is that true? Maybe that's why I was instructed to shut down my laptop immediately when I called the techs.