Morning everyone.
Realized last night I suffered a terrible loss at the hands of some ..... (myself).
I've lost every computer file I've ever saved in my life. I'm devastated to say the least. over 300 gigs of photos videos music TV shows and movies. When I realized I almost cried .... then I went to bed at 7:30 because I just couldn't think straight.
Let me start by saying I'm always backing up. Though I have gotten lazy and only had a single backup for the last 8-10 months. Mainly because my files had gotten so large and I've spent my money on
vape stuff instead of picking up another 1Tb drive.
Here is the full story if you have the time (Will be wordy I'm sure)
Last week my wife who actually needs a computer for school and work could not get on our internet with her mac mini.
I determined after some work that the 802.11 was kaput in her machine. Its not like the older macs where I can just pick up a new airport card and pop it in. Its built right on the board (I think) but either way she needed to get back on the net fast for her doctorate courses. Because we've been burning up the money remodeling the house I figured I would give her my macbook pro thats only a year old. Its actually perfect because she can plug in the big 27" monitor when she's at her desk with keyboard and trackpad or unplug the mini display port and usb to take the computer to the couch or with her to school or work. She thanked me for giving up my baby. Its a screaming machine with 8gig of ram and a 128 gig SSD boot drive and 750 gig 7200 rpm data drive.
My actual files were all on the second drive with just the OS and documents on the SSD.
My plan was to leave the SSD with my OS and clone her drive to the 750 gig magnetic drive. So to do so I had to wipe the drive of my files. I did one last back up manually (had several backup copies on the same 1gig external drive). Mistake #1 I did not check the backup drive when completed. I spent a whole day cloning and putting everything just right so she would not even notice it was a different computer (except its faster and works). I made sure all her stuff was perfect then cloned the SSD from the macbook back to the Mac mini (her old computer) because I was going to use it up stairs at my desk with ethernet for connecting to the net because the router is at my desk anyway.
So I've been using the mini for a few days and its just like my previous macbook, everything just as I left it. Even still logged into all my stuff and everything. I'm pretty happy except its about 5X slower than my machine was. Now it has a 320 gig 5400 rpm drive which is not big enough for all my files but I took some pics yesterday and decided to put my iPhoto library on the machine because that would at least fit on the drive.
Plug in my external backup drive and nothing ... wont even recogninze it ..... ... .... my heart actually started racing and a feeling of doom flooded over me. How could I be so stupid to have just a single copy of my important stuff even for only a few days ..... Damit.
Run downstairs with the drive and try it on the macbook ... nothing. Try it on an old windows machine ... nothing.
Think maybe its the enclosure gone bad. Pull the drive out of the enclosure and find my old toaster style external drive bay that has USB and firewire. Nothing, the drive spins up by it wants me to format because its not recognized by any computer in the house.
So my only option now is to actually format it (so it will load) and immediately run my drive forensic software on it. I can search sector by sector and bit by bit. I've done this several times before for other people (I was in computer forensic classes for two semesters a few years ago). I know how its going to work though. Its going to find 70-80% of my stuff but its a real mess to sort out. I loose all my ratings and playlists on iTunes .... all the pics get new file names and they will need to be sorted by hand it will take months to get close to anything as organized as I had it.
I'm still so stunned I can't even say im upset, I'm just disappointed in my decision making during the whole process. I know better but really cut some corners and it came back to bite my in the biggest way possible.
Oh well I can't turn back the clock.
Hope you all have the best day possible. Vape on.
BTW, here is the photo I took yesterday. I was taking it for another thread but at the time I pressed the shutter I was thinking life is great. 10 minutes later I knew what a terrible mistake had been made (by me)
