26 December 2009 back up reverse or regret

About 1100 today, I started to back up my photos to an external hard drive. My intention was to do the same with my document files when the photos had been secured.


I then opened a maintenance program, “CCleaner,” and initiated a cleanup of old cookies, stored web sites, temporary files, etc. Since a new version “CCleaner” was available, I down loaded it and installed it then proceeded with my clean up. In the process, I overlooked the intended document backup.

Somewhere in the process, I hit an incorrect key, checked or unchecked the wrong box, missed a warning, or just plain screwed up. Somewhere in the host of old files and other electronic detritus being purged from my notebook was my 2009 blog directory and all the files saved into it since September of this year.

One of the good things about “CCleaner” is that it over-writes instead of just erasing data. Harder to recover such files. Harder, indeed! They effectively ceased to exist.

I down loaded a data recovery program from the folks who do “CCleaner.” It makes sense that if anyone can recover what their work vanished, it would be them. So after an hour of scanning my notebook’s hard drive, “Recuva”( I don’t name them, just use them ) told me that there were a few recoverable files on my hard drive, 450 or so, but that nothing I was hoping to find could be found.

Still, not all was lost. The blog entries were archived and could be down loaded, copied to a Word document , and recovered in that manner. Such a process would be tedious but better than lost files. Still, one last search among the backup files yielded a recent back up of the particular subset of documents I wanted to recover. There, waiting patiently on the external hard drive, were all the files from September through 7 December. Therefore, I quickly copied them back to the notebook, recovered the missing December files from the on-line archives, and then backed up the document files from the notebook to the external hard drive and to an SD card. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy pays off sometimes. Obsessive-Compulsive behavior is not always a bad thing. Back when my most important personal files were secured on 3.5-inch floppy drives, I had three sets that I used for backups. Each day one of the sets had everything copied to it, the next day, a different set. redundancy.

Now I have to download the help files for “CCleaner” in order to figure out what error I committed resulting in loss of files. I am not about to blame it on software. I would like to but that would be like blaming sunburn on the sun.

I recall one 30th of December in Palmetto. We had bought a new Pentium desktop, complete with tape back up from an assembler company, one hoping to become a big brand. We booted the computer, it promptly crashed. Several phone calls to a customer service rep who must have had a hot date for a wild party resulted in little satisfaction beyond yelling at someone who was equally ready to yell at me but who couldn’t. The end result was that I spent the night doing complete software re-install, several times, essentially doing what the company should have done before shipping our computer out to us. There was no rest as the sun came up. We had to be in Tampa to rescue my mother from the airlines. Suffice it to say I’ll stick to brand names that have been around for some time and who show the probability of remaining in business. If nothing else, it helps prevent dozing off before midnight on New Year’s Eve.

So, be good to your selves. Backup, Backup, Backup!