I spent much of the first day of the year trying to recover data.
I logged onto my laptop this morning and was trying to edit a few photos when I got my first bluescreen with the new laptop. I restarted only to discover that my profile was corrupt. Okay, not to panic, I had this happen with another machine a year or two ago so I calmly tried to login again. This time it created a TEMP profile. I saw my files stored in my old profile and copied them over. Not sure if this was a mistake or not but after restarting, files were gone. Crap!
Okay let’s try System Restore. No good. Couldn’t restore to any previous dates. Next I’d search for a data recovery tool. A couple of tries and I found PC Recovery Tool. Somewhat awkward but it did manage to find most of my files, i.e. photos, videos, music and a few presentations. This process took the better part of 3 hours.
Now most if not all of these files were stored somewhere else but I wanted to see what was necessary to recover. Backing up more often is one lesson learned and yet I wonder if I’ll really do this. I certainly am grateful much of my work resides online as well. (Flickr, archive.org, google docs, del.icio.us to name a few) The most frustrating part was trying to restore my FireFox profile. I couldn’t recover it and trying to recreate all my extensions, bookmarks and settings is a bit of a pain.
Happy New Year.
Sorry to read about your laptop troubles…have you considered setting up your machine for dual booting and creating a data partition? ALl your stuff is saved on 10-20 gigs of the Data partition and you just keep programs loaded on your two other partitions (Windows and UbuntuLinux). It works great for me…
If Windows dies for whatever the reason, you have 2 choices…boot to linux to access your data and since you’re online, you can still do lots of stuff. Or, you can restore your Windows partition from a backup.
Use Partimage to make backups of each partition, then you can restore them as needed from a 120gig usb drive (or whatever you have).
Something to consider!
Best wishes,
Miguel
I did have a separate data partition on my last machine. But since the machine is already mapped, can I still create a partition? How would I set up dual booting? The closest I’ve got to using Linux is burning an Edubuntu CD.
Dean,
Sorry to hear about your laptop trials. I know what it feels like. I bought a new mac-mini for the family, transferred all the files over from our old imac and during the last part of process, ended up with the computer getting hung up so I rebooted and …. no harddrive apparent. Thank goodness that I had a backup copy of the old machine made before doing all the transfering. But, I’m up and running – and with a new MacPro laptop – Santa was very good to me 😉 Have a great year, I’ll be in touch.
Kelly
Dean, quick response here:
http://www.mguhlin.net/archives/2007/01/entry_2493.htm
Skype me for a walkthrough….
Dean – I’ve been using Foxmarks for Firefox for some months now; it uploads my bookmarks to my Foxmarks.com profile every few minutes (whenever I’ve got Firefox open); it also allows me to sync my home bookmarks with my classroom computer.
For what it’s worth…. Rich