Goodbye Ivor Cutler – and thanks!
I hang my head in shame – after nearly 20 years of PC use I can still fall prey to ‘I didn’t do a proper backup’.
Last night, moved a large number of files from drive D: to drive F:. Ran out of space on drive F:. Lots of space left on drive E: so set Partition Magic to resize E giving some of its space to F. OK, eagle-eyes, what did I forget?
1) make sure you have good backups
2) run Scandisk before doing anything with partitions.
Partition Magic hung for half an hour in the middle of resizing. Then declared its task 100% completed and successful. I go into Explorer and look. All the folders on E and F are there OK. E works perfectly. Go into any of the folder in F and it’s all gobbledygook. Oh. And F, which should now be 27g is boasting some ‘files’ of 278g. Oh Oh. Run Scandisk and Norton Disk Doctor. Masses of unrecoverable errors. Oh Oh Oh. Look at my backups – very diligent in backing up E, which has all documents, email, Pocket PC files etc. Full backup this very day. Drive F – zero. Nada. Squat. What was on it? Lots of dispensible rubbish, except for my mp3 collection, most of which is on my mp3 player and – what’s this? Only the masters of all my songs. Oh. I would work on the songs in Cubase on the D drive (where everything is still intact) then when songs were finished and burnt onto CD, archive them on F. The important stuff like my albums I have on CD. A lot of other stuff is on my site. I have the Cubase for most things. So it’s not an absolute disaster, but I’ve lost stuff. I probably won’t know what until I want it for something. And all because, as so many PC users have said before me and will always say, I didn’t have time or space on other drives to set up backups.
Old dog, learn some new tricks.