Tuesday, May 31, 2005

 

I finally recovered an important file

Last year, shortly after New Year's, we had a big storm roll through where I live in the Pacific Northwest. Thunder, lightning, heavy rain, the works. I was away from my house cruising through some state parks. I came home to find my power was off. Not unavailable as other house up and down the street had lights on, but my house was totally dark. It was night when I pulled into the driveway and I noticed my nightlights which usually can be seen from outside were not on. I entered and smelled the smell of darkness, the darkness in integrated circuits after it gets out when the IC's fry. The smell of electronics death filled the air. If you ever had elecronics die when the darkness got out, you know this particular smell of electronic death. Long story short, a lightning strike had happened less than a block away and the surge got into my house. (The surge in the house closest to the strike had fire shooting out of their wiring which fortunately did not start a fire.) I found some electrical equipment was fried internally, including my computers. I eventually built up another computer from parts I was able to salvage along with parts from boxes in the garage which I had kept after replacements when upgrading the hardware. I found the hard disks were still good but were damaged. The drives responded in the rebuilt machine, but the data was not recognized. I acquired a data recovery program and commenced retrieving the data. It has taken me MONTHS of run-time to recover the partitions on each disk and then to go through the thousands of files recovered to salvage the good ones of interest. For example, I didn't care about programs, but I was concerned with the data files I had. Sorting out the data, a very small portion of the total files recovered, has been a very tedious and boring operation and then, paydirt. I had a journal I kept, password protected of course, which I was loathe to lose, hence the effort to recover data. How could I know I would experience multpile failures and not only would all the drives be corrupted by also my tape drives which I used for backup tapes. Without a similar tape drive with the same kind of hardware compression, I could NOT read my backup tapes! So, there it is, my tale of woe about losing my computers to a lightning strike I was not here to see. A lesson on backups should be learned here, do NOT use hardwre compression built into a tape drive unless you have another one sitting on a shelf uninstalled. My backup tape drive was installed and was taken out along witht the primary drive with the lightning strike..Here it is, more than a year after the fact, and I still have not found a tape drive with the same hardware compression, so the tapes are unreadable. So, the file I recovered was my electronic journal but a problem exists, the file is encrypted by the program which made it and I can't find the original program which is on a CD somewhere in the boxes of stuff I have. Another lesson to learn here is to NOT encrypt an important file with a proprietary encryption feature. A few days ago, I found the program, installed it and wonder of wonders, it worked! I now have my daata back and I've turned off the internal encryption and stored the files as a backup offsite and also on floppy disks. Take a lesson here, people, if something is important to you, do NOT save it in only one place, have a totally independent means of backing up important data. I was fortunate I was able to recover from this multi-way disaster. You might not be so fortunate.

Posted by: Rowlfe - at: 5/31/2005 10:30:00 PM

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