(no subject)

[arethinn]

Dumb Mistake of the Day:

I was copying things back over into the new My Documents from my D: mirror. I moved the file folders one by one, being careful not to miss any. I looked at them side by side and made sure every one was duplicated. Then I deleted the "spare" My Documents and after some other tidying up, emptied the Recycle Bin.

Then, a short while ago when I went to open something from the folder, I realized the Dumb Mistake. I had taken pains to triple-check that I hadn't missed any folders, yes. But I forgot to copy all the files that were just "loose" in the main My Documents level. Norton couldn't find any fragments to unerase, "recover" only works on NTFS volumes (doh!), and you can't "restore" once you've deleted. Well fark. I don't recall all the contents of the folder, although it wasn't terribly much, maybe forty files or so.

A good deal of it can't be reconstructed, but either I don't think I would need it anymore anyway, or it's just not that important and I'll have to let it go: stuff referring to an auto accident now past its time limit of mattering to my insurance company, some semi-technical information about different kinds of opiate drugs, two paper letters to enotsola from around 1999 or 2000.

Some of it I can find again or recreate, although with some annoyance: my expenses spreadsheet, PDFs of film development info for certain films, my current resume and references, my templates for glamourbomb papers in half-sheet, quarter-sheet, and sixteenth-sheet "slip" sizes. I've also lost the current queue of things to put in the Faery Miscellany, but I think some of that can be reconstructed by digging into the sidhelist archives a little ways for some Silver Elves stuff, and trawling back through the otherkin posts until I come across a request I made for material, and following the threads there (hopefully to the same stuff I found before). I didn't have a whole lot built up so I don't think it's a big loss, although it's going to be a bit of a pain.

Some of it I can't recreate and am pretty put out about: a file of words I'd glossed in a kind of "faery" or "elven" language; the fairly extensive dictionary and detailed grammar rules for an alien language I'd made up; a file full of recipes for "cakes" such as one would use in a Pagan ritual. These make me go grr, but I suppose I'll live.

But then there's a couple of things I can't recreate and that just make me want to smack my forehead against a handy object:

• A Word document about two pages long containing all the passwords for everything I need a login and password for. I used to keep a hardcopy printed out, but over time got annoyed with having to refer to it and thought that just opening the file whenever I needed it was easier. (Yes, I know this isn't terribly secure.) I've done my best to memory-dump, but a good deal of it is lost to the mists of time. On the bright side, there are some I recall not ever having used past the time I set them up in the first place (so why write them down? I dunno) and others have sort of gone obsolete over time, so maybe I don't need them so badly anymore, whereas the ones I actually use tend to have still been in my head. So overall, I guess I didn't lose THAT much, but it's still worrisome.


• A massive Excel spreadsheet containing all the music, movies, and books I want to get my hands on, books divided into "low" and "high" priority for a total of some four or five hundred lines. This really makes me want to cry, as there's no damn way I'm going to be able to recreate this (maybe over time, but not anywhen soon, since it was a months-long gradual compilation in the first place). There was a time when all the "high" ones were in my Amazon wishlist as a kind of backup, but then my boss said that she had found that I had one and I hurriedly removed a lot of the contents and hadn't ever gotten around to putting them back.


• My lovely, huge quotefile. My hundreds of pages long quotefile. My quotefile that's grown over the years from being an actual handwritten notebook in the early 1990s. Argh. I can't even find the words for what kind of loss of effort this is. Never mind banging the head, I think I need something much more drastic. :(

All in all this has been a crappy weekend.

Comments

[aodhfionn.livejournal.com]

Ack. Sorry to hear that. :-/ Hope some of the suggestions help you recover some of the lost data.