Death of a Hard Drive

So I am still somewhere in the depression stage over this hard drive failure.  It is simply hard to accept that the short time window where I was trying to back up some files from the main desktop computer led to this chain of events, i.e. the monitor falling in such a random way.  I'm also trying to deflect some blame, since there is no question work policies (and this particularly insistent IT guy) compounded the problem, as I would have made additional back-ups of the data.

At any rate, I got the quote back from the recovery place, and it was too high - $1350.  I think in this case they shot themselves in the foot by saying that it was such an incredibly complex job, so that I figure they will only be able recover partial files that are of limited use.  My understanding is that it is $1350, take it or leave it.  Not $1350 if they recover essentially all the files and only $700 if only 50% of the data is valid.

I think I might have gone as high as $800 if essentially all the files had been reconstructed, but it's that extra bit over the top -- and the fact that the files I want most are almost sure to be damaged (the last recordings of BBC Radio 3 that I moved onto the drive) -- that have convinced me it is not worth it.

So I am trying to reconstruct (in my head) what is actually on there, and what might be backed up elsewhere.  In the last month, I had moved a handful of movie files over and a fair amount of music to listen to at work.  That is on other hard drives.  What I don't have are the DVDs that I backed up over the past two months, so that will be a total pain redoing those.  It was probably 7 or 8.

The BBC Radio 3 stuff is gone completely, so I just have to put it out of my mind.  I find that since going cold turkey, I don't miss it that much.  It was always hit or miss whether I had time to listen to it or archive it properly.  At this point, I have probably 5 year's worth of shows squirreled away, which should be enough for a long time.

The good news is that the TransLink email was left backed up on TransLink servers, as I anticipated they would need it down the line.  Much of what I brought over with me were TransLink files I needed to wrap up the documentation, so I have been able to request that those files be sent over.  I was particularly worried about the C drive Mydocs folder, (which isn't on the TransLink servers), but I just turned up a copy of this from late Feb (about when I had left) on another hard drive.  So that disaster may be averted.

Unfortunately, the final version of the documentation is gone, but I had sent around version 5 and then the edited concluding chapter of version 6, so that covers most of the work I did, and I was able to rebuild the file and only lose a bit of progress.  There are probably some other interim files that are gone, particularly some GIS files I created, but nothing too critical.

It appears that the massive backup (to tif and pdf files) was backed up around late Feb, just as I was leaving TransLink.  A substantial subset of the scans I generated at work between March and June is backed up, but not all of them.  That's probably the biggest loss I am aware of, and I'm sure that at some point I'll be very upset about not being able to track down some file or other.  Some of this is actually backed up because of the way work emails are stored, but I am not sure I really want to go down that path.  Probably better to just accept the loss.  It's pretty clear I am not going to heavily edit my dissertation and turn it into a book, and even if I did, these news clippings and other statistical data just won't help.  I would have already used them and cited them in the dissertation if they were relevant.  It's better to start letting go.  I've already gone from 3 files cabinets of junk like this to 2, and perhaps in another year I will be down to one.

One other piece of good news is that the various academic articles I downloaded (during visits to UBC or SFU and now UT) are backed up because those always were put on a flash drive and not directly to the external hard drive.

No question there is a core of stuff I wish I hadn't lost, but I think this is largely limited to the BBC Radio 3 recordings from the last two weeks and the tif/pdf backups I generated at work March through May.  After I get a better handle on that, I'll decide whether I ask the IT guys to try to restore some of those emails.  I'll probably never completely get over this loss, but there is no question it could have been far, far worse.  It looks like most of the TransLink material was backed up in two or three locations (as everything should be!) and it is only fairly recent material that is completely gone (but that is generally easier to reconstruct, at least the bits that are work-related).