As I was jotting down the other day, I have been having severe computer issues that cropped up recently. I assumed that I would need to get a new computer (and probably that isn't a bad idea, as frustrating as that would be, if I can find one with extra RAM and hard drive space, as well as an internal digital drive). Anyway, I was realizing that I probably could just use the cmd prompt to copy over the recent files to the new external hard drive and then reformat the C drive if necessary. All was going ok until I found out that the cmd prompt couldn't even recognize the drive, and that all the Explorer issues were due to a catastrophic failure on the part of the (very new) external hard drive(!) not the desktop itself.
So I unplugged the failing hard drive and the computer went back to normal. So that's sort of a happy ending. However, I had been of course been using this failed hard drive to consolidate all the backups over the past month or so. (And it seems ridiculously unfair that a drive I bought only a month or so ago suffered such a catastrophic failure.) Now most folders and files are still on another hard drives, so it will be annoying but not impossible to restore. However, this failed drive is the only place where a lot of videos and concerts from the Rex were stored, as well as pretty much all the museum photos over the past 2 months. (It's particularly galling as there was no immediate reason to remove the brand-new Xmas2025 folder from this older laptop after I copied it onto the new hard drive, but I did...)
As it just was failing in this past day (and chkdsk can still basically see the drive), there is a reasonably good chance that if I send it off to one of those data recovery centres, they can back it up (for a very large fee). I'll call tomorrow. I might as well send another bad drive that a different data recovery centre wasn't able to restore (from over a decade ago, however). It's also ironic that if this had happened a few days back, I could have had someone who lives in Waterloo run it over to Guelph, but that won't work in this case.
I guess I will take the time to re-evaluate. I think I need to stop taping so much music off the internet. I'll probably drop BBC New Music Show and Round Midnight (which really backs up as it is five days per week!) and just focus on Music Planet. Now whether that justifies keeping the VPN service is a question for another day.
So I am in a pretty crappy, crappy mood. It could have been worse, in that some of the big files I was working on were also copied over onto a flashdrive for my son, and I can back those up immediately (and I had backed up some Jeff Wall images a few other places, which I would have done for everything aside from just not having enough free hard drive space on the drives that didn't fail!), but it is still a huge drag. I may toy with the idea of storing more of this stuff in "the cloud," but I really don't want anything else that is going to do weird automatic backups and further degrade this computer. The constant Windows upgrades are already as bad as a virus. And most of these services are pretty costly, but the biggest single stumbling block is that none of them actually guarantee the privacy of your data, with Gdrive being the worst, with Google clearly letting AIs have access to data in the cloud. I had better go off to the gym, as I have already been delayed enough by this setback.
Edit (01/06): I managed to get the hard drive sent out by UPS this afternoon, though for 4x what I was expecting to pay! (To be fair, this included some bubble wrap and them packing it up for me, but still...) I only hope this isn't a harbinger of what it will cost me, assuming that Recovery Force actually can recover the data. There will be the cost of a new blank USB stick or hard drive, depending on how much data can be salvaged, plus shipping, and maybe even a disposal fee after they are done. I saw on the website that they change an additional $500 if the drive was opened by someone else. I didn't do that in this case, but the older drive that failed was clearly opened by someone at that other recovery centre. So it is almost certainly not worth it at this point, but if this goes well, I might end up in a bit of a back and forth discussion on what they would actually charge to attempt to recover data off a second hard drive.
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