$700 V-8 Moment

Remember those commercials for V-8? The ones where the characters realize the folly of their ways and whack themselves in the forehead, saying “Wow! I could have had a V-8”? That was me earlier today. ‘Cept my moment didn’t have anything to do with the USDA Food Pyramid.

Today I got the call from the nice man at the data recovery service that has my dead hard drive. Dead it is. Physical damage, thank you very much, not helped in any way from the optimizing process of a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, optimizing the drive meant that the bad part scraped across the drive plates. So now the only way to recover the data is to do a raw data recovery.

A raw recovery means they find all the files they can that have the same extension. All the .jpg files in one folder, .awk in another, etc., etc. With no filenames attached, thank you very much. So I might get my data back, assuming they can recover most of it, but I won’t be able to identify any of it. I’ll have to go through whole folders, file by file, determining whether the file numbered 3042.jpg is a picture of my kid’s Christmas or some cheesy picture on a random website I visited once. Yegods. Fun of this sort will take just slightly less than forever, and I’ll be ponying up $700 for the privilege. But it’s worth it to get the aforementioned Christmas photos back, along with not having to recreate all those files from scratch. Thank the good Lord I did have the presence of mind to back up the novels, or I’d really be a babbling wreck right now.

The lesson, my darlings, is to back up. Back up, back up, back up. RIGHT. FRICKIN’. NOW.