Mick's World

It’s been a couple of days since my last post. I’ve been recovering lost data from one of my hard drives. I had four partitions and over the last couple of months each partition died, one after the other. When trying to access the partitions from within Windows it would say it was "Inaccessible". Great. Due to not having another hard drive of the same size or bigger, i couldn’t recover all of the data.

Recently i purchased a new PC, which gave me the amount of space i would require to perform the recovery operation. As is the case with most things, it wasn’t straight forward and simple. I tried a number of applications to retrieve my lost and corrupt data. After much trial and error, i was able to successfully recover most of my it using a program called R-Studio. The part i couldn’t recover was all the work i’ve ever done for clients or myself, including invoices. It was recovering the files, but they were either 0kb or corrupt.

At this point my levels of stress, anxiety and anger started to rise at a rapid rate. A beer and cigar were in order.

The next day i tried a few other data recovery applications, and again was unsuccessful. At this point i was beginning to accept my loss and move on, however i’m not one to give up that easily. I tried a few more programs including EasyRecovery. It was taking around 3-4 hours to scan each partition, then another couple of hours to recover the data in other applications. I only had one partition to go thankfully. I set EasyRecovery to scan and it only took around 2 hours. After the scanning competed it’s the moment of truth. When i came back a couple of hours after setting it to recover the data i had a look through. Some of the files i tested actually worked, where they didn’t with previous recovery attempts. Later i tested more of the data and i was so relieved to find that it had all been recovered successfully.

I learned an extremely important lesson from this. BACKUP ALL THE TIME! I won’t be lazy about my backing up anymore. I hope.

Anyway apart from spending a few days trying to get all my stuff back, I’ve been building a couple of PCs, including one for myself, which stats are on my about page (the second one). Nice and new, i love the smell of new computer equipment.

I’ve also been listening to Ugly Duckling (UD) a lot. If you haven’t heard them and you’re not locked into a specific genre of music, they’re definately worth a listen. Their style is similar to Jurassic 5, and they’ve got some very inventive lyrics. The album i’ve been listening to mostly is an older one called "Taste the secret". The whole album is a story, which is continued through each song, about the members of UD working at a place called Meatshake. The beats on the tracks are also excellent and different from most other Rap beats. Both lyrics and beats go hand in hand to produce some great listening material.

After listening to it for a while i got curious to see if anyone had tried to make a Meatshake. I did some searching and didn’t uncover much, except this site called FeralWeb. I can’t believe these guys would attempt to drink it. It’s funny to read about though.