I feel stupid now... :p (data recovery story)

KGhaleon

The other night I downloaded several fairly large movie files onto my laptop, mainly podcasts(episodes 44/45). Later that evening, I decided to take them off my flash drive(which I use to transfer files between my laptop and desktop PC). I accidently copied them from the flash drive to the hard drive instead of cutting them...so I just deleted the copies on the flash drive. I then went and cleaned out the recyling bin to get rid of them. All was well.

...or so I thought.

I look into the folder where I copied them earlier and found they were gone. "Did I just delete those as well?" I panic. I do a full search of the drive thinking I copied them to the wrong folder...they are nowhere to be found. Not wanting to spend hours downloading them all over again...I pulled out my data recovery software.

I ran Restoration and it kept crashing, I then tried testdisk and it recovered a ton of old files off the flash drive...but not the ones I was looking for...weird. I ran Filerecovery professional and had it scan all the partitions for most of the night. The next morning I looked them over and...nope. Nothing.

I gave up and figured I would just download them again today and went to a nearby hotspot. I downloaded one of the large files, and noted that it was called ---44-1.mp4. "-1!?" I say.

I look at the desktop where I saved the file and noted they were both right there. I never copied them to my flashdrive yesterday. X_X

So the reason I didn't find them was because I forgot to put them on the flashdrive. When I copied them from the flash drive to the hard drive, I actually copied the older files off such as episode 42 and 43. So when I looked at the hard drive, I was looking for 44 and 45 and not seeing them.

That'll teach me to stay up late.

KG

seuss_ssues

Dont feel bad we have all been there.

One day i was redoing one of my test machines that had previously had linux installed on it. I was in the process of installing windows 2003 server. When it came to the point where you format/partition there was a long list of partitions on the disk. Remembering that I had previously had linux on there I deleted them all. Curiously enough now there were 2 hard drives listed and the machine only had 1 hard drive in it. Come to find out id left my portable hard drive plugged in and removed its partition too.

KGhaleon

ouch.

The first time I installed Linux was when I played around with a slackware distro. I later got my hands on a copy of Mandrake and decided to have it dual-bootable with my windows 2000 desktop PC. I only had one hard drive and created a separate partition for mandrake. During setup it asked me if I wanted to use all the space and I told it "yes," thinking it was talking about the partition. It was actually talking about the entire disk.

I lost all my data.

That was a sad day.