Every now and then, folks from my family or friends come to me when they lose their documents and data because of a hardware/software fault or a simple accidental removal..
Most often there are family photos, witch is something people generally care about, and sometimes the photos just disappear so people come to me:
“hey Stebbi, my vacation pictures disappeared from the flash drive, can you find them ?”
“Stebbi, I kept my hard drive on top of a large speaker for a year and now I cant open my files, can you fix it ?”
“hey Stebbi.. all my family photos for the last 6 years are all gone, can you find them for me?”
Okay, I forgive people for not having a backup of photos that are still on the camera but when on a hard drive… for 6 years.. come on !
so I usually ask, although I know the answer:
me: “so, where is your backup?”
friend: “…”
me: “you DO have a backup, don’t you?”
friend: “.. a back..up.. ? ”
I have actually gotten the question “why should I?”
…I think it has something to do with the “I’ts not going to happen to me” syndrome- but believe me, it will eventually happen, hard disks crash, and file system tables will get corrupted for no reason.
It was just the other day, I got a 250GB hard drive full of photos:
- 5-6 years collection of photos
- No backup.. why should there be ?
- I was told that some albums had disappeared.
I was actually shocked when she brought me the bag with the hard drive:
Okay, stuffing the hard drive and the power cords is maybe not that bad..
but try to keep the knots on the power cords to the minimum.. there are 3 knots there.
The case was really scratched and didn’t seem to be well kept, and the dent on the top is not supposed to be there, is it ?
I plugged it to my computer and saw that some folders were not accessible, so I tried a simple windows scandisk.
It turned out to be my easiest data “recovery” yet, -there were some error that got fixed so all folders were accessible.
But people are not always so lucky..
So please, back up your important data. don’t be the next example of why you should..
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If the scandisk wouldn’t have worked, my next step was to plug it into my Linux machine and run photorec.
Photorec is a recovery software I really like, what is your favorite recovery software ?
