I had a very long day today between getting the lights up outside and working on the computer. I had picked out a few possible pictures for our Christmas card this year and was sitting down with Kris to pick out which one we would use. She asked about whether we had a picture of the girls together from the first day of school. I did, but I had put it onto a USB drive for storage, as I have with all of our photos from about the last 5 or 6 years at least. So I got it out, plugged it into my laptop, and a message pops up saying that the drive is not formatted, do I want to format it now? Well, I know for sure what happens when you reformat something, so I knew things weren't good.
I unplugged it and plugged it into Kris' desktop. I got the same message. I tried it in the kids' computer down iin the basement and the same message popped up. When I checked the properties of the drive, it said there was 0 data written on it. I knew that wasn't right because I had just transferred pictures to is about two weeks earlier. So I knew there was still data on there, I just needed to figure out how to get it.
This was the start of a massive migraine for the day. After about half an hour of googling for some sort of lead on where to begin, I had found some free programs that "guaranteed" to recover your data from a corrupted USB drive. I ended up installing a couple and trying them out. So while they were scanning, I went outside to get the lights set up. Like I said, this was the start of a tremendous headache. I think it was because I had two years worth of photos on that USB drive, and I was freaking out that I was going to lose them. I had that happen a few years ago when I was transferring photos to CDs, and I deleted the originals thinking I had copied them to a CD for storage. Well I either missed some and thought I copied them, or I thought I had a duplicate CD and threw it out. Either way, I lost about 4 months worth of pictures, which included mother's day. Kris wasn't happy at all. So now I had three times as many pictures possibly on the chopping block.
After a break of a half an hour, some lunch and a handful of painkillers I came back to work on the USB drive. Unfortunately, the "guaranteed" programs got me absolutely nothing. So I started some more research. After another hour, I managed to find another program that said it could get the data off of a corrupted USB drive. This one however was a DOS program, and the reviewer said that many people felt intimidated by the DOS based program so they just skipped using it, but the reviewer went on to say it was the best one he had found. So I gave it a try, and 2 minutes after installing it, I was watching the progress window listing the number of files recovered. I let out a huge sigh of relief because I was getting my data back. The program I got to do it was free, so maybe I'll throw the author a bone and donate $10 or something to him. It's worth at least that to get all of our memories back.
Kris suggested that maybe wee should subscribe to Carbonite, or one of those other data backup services. Again, with my luck in losing things (having computers crash and losing data) it might not be a bad "insurance policy". I think I might look into it next week when I have a few minutes.
EDIT: It just dawned on me that I should list the name of the program in case anyone comes across this while looking for how to retrieve data from a corrupted drive. I used a program called TestDisk and PhotoRecovery from a company called CG Security. You can download it here. I highly recommend it.
I unplugged it and plugged it into Kris' desktop. I got the same message. I tried it in the kids' computer down iin the basement and the same message popped up. When I checked the properties of the drive, it said there was 0 data written on it. I knew that wasn't right because I had just transferred pictures to is about two weeks earlier. So I knew there was still data on there, I just needed to figure out how to get it.
This was the start of a massive migraine for the day. After about half an hour of googling for some sort of lead on where to begin, I had found some free programs that "guaranteed" to recover your data from a corrupted USB drive. I ended up installing a couple and trying them out. So while they were scanning, I went outside to get the lights set up. Like I said, this was the start of a tremendous headache. I think it was because I had two years worth of photos on that USB drive, and I was freaking out that I was going to lose them. I had that happen a few years ago when I was transferring photos to CDs, and I deleted the originals thinking I had copied them to a CD for storage. Well I either missed some and thought I copied them, or I thought I had a duplicate CD and threw it out. Either way, I lost about 4 months worth of pictures, which included mother's day. Kris wasn't happy at all. So now I had three times as many pictures possibly on the chopping block.
After a break of a half an hour, some lunch and a handful of painkillers I came back to work on the USB drive. Unfortunately, the "guaranteed" programs got me absolutely nothing. So I started some more research. After another hour, I managed to find another program that said it could get the data off of a corrupted USB drive. This one however was a DOS program, and the reviewer said that many people felt intimidated by the DOS based program so they just skipped using it, but the reviewer went on to say it was the best one he had found. So I gave it a try, and 2 minutes after installing it, I was watching the progress window listing the number of files recovered. I let out a huge sigh of relief because I was getting my data back. The program I got to do it was free, so maybe I'll throw the author a bone and donate $10 or something to him. It's worth at least that to get all of our memories back.
Kris suggested that maybe wee should subscribe to Carbonite, or one of those other data backup services. Again, with my luck in losing things (having computers crash and losing data) it might not be a bad "insurance policy". I think I might look into it next week when I have a few minutes.
EDIT: It just dawned on me that I should list the name of the program in case anyone comes across this while looking for how to retrieve data from a corrupted drive. I used a program called TestDisk and PhotoRecovery from a company called CG Security. You can download it here. I highly recommend it.
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