If you happen to be reading these blogs from the bottom up, or for some strange reason actually reading them as they are posted, then you know that my computer had a major harddrive crash.
I used SpinRite to repair the drive as much as it could be repaired. Did its job well enough. But no miracle in data recovery. Okay, I know that grc.com (Gibson Research) doesn't promise data recovery. But I was hoping that somehow fixing the bad sectors would magically make the data come back.
I would have had better luck waving a bowl of Lucky Charms over the drive.
So the next step was google and the long dive off a short pier into the murky waters of data recovery. Man, there is a ton of bull shit websites devoted to taking advantage of some poor sucker desperate to get data back.
Fortunately my karma musta been good (alright not too good or maybe the drive would not have gone belly up) but still, I managed to stumble across a helpful website.
I'm sure there are more. There may be much better. Don't know. Since I only needed one working tool and no one is paying me to do a comparative study of recovery tools, I quit looking when I found runtime.org and GetDataBack.
I was a little put off by the fact that I had to know what type of drive I had. Might be nice if they made a little tool to tell me. Don't laugh. Do you know if you have a six or twelve volt battery in your car? What, they come in different sizes?
Much to my surprise, and the reason I decided to give these guys a chance, they have a totally enlightened approach to retail on their site.
They give you a free download of a fully functional program with one exception -- the ability to save your files. Other than the fact you can't save the files it functions 100%. Might sound like a major bummer. You put all the time into discovering if you can get your data back only to find out you can't save it.
Well, that is exactly what I wanted. I wanted to know if I could save my data before I shelled out $79. As bad as it is to have totally lost data, it is even worse to spend money then find out the data is totally lost.
But what about all that time spent waiting while the GetDataBack rebuilds new directories and scavenges around for files? Not a problem. If you find that you have access to your data, you buy the program, they give you an instant registration, you input the registration into the STILL open program, you save your files.
So basically you can poke around and see if your data is recoverable before you shell money out to recover it. I like that.
An interesting side effect of this was a serious talk with myself about the value of the lost data. Before I found the data I *knew* it must be valuable. After I found the data and was staring at it (face to face) I finally confronted the real question "Are those missing files worth $79 to me?"
In my case the answer was yes. And fortunately the GetDataBack performed as promised.
Notably I am so shell shocked as a consumer on the web that I am still waiting for the gotcha. Whether it be spyware, backdoors, identity theft, or ????... I can't quite shake the feeling that I've been screwed. Why? Because as a consumer on the web every time I turn around I'm getting screwed -- or almost screwed.
In this case, so far so goo....
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