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FreeUndelete Saved My Life

// January 28th, 2007 // Blog Stuff // 2,355 views

What a blast. The 27dinner rocked Jozi last night. On returning home just after 02:00, I promptly downloaded the pictures to my home laptop to upload later on for your viewing pleasure. Little did I know what was to follow when I woke up after a bit of a nap.

During the quick post to chat about Creative Commons licenses my machine started hanging every few minutes, until it finally gave up the ghost. I finished the last few lines of that post from the TyTN – It actually works.

Anyhow, since I was quite used to recoveries and backups etc, I tried to reboot and restore to the last known good configuration, but to no avail. Getting a bit anxious at the prospect of actually loosing data, emails and shock-horror, last night’s 27dinner photographs I resorted to removing the hard-drive, plugging it into an external cradle and booting from the other laptop.

Nada, nothing, zip. She’s dead. My hard-drive died.

**At this point I could utter a couple of very choice words, but I’ll keep this post PG rated instead.

As I also suspected, and triple-checked, I moved the photographs directly off the camera’s compact flash card, therefore no “backup” of the pictures.

**At this point some more choice words could be uttered.

As a last ditch resort I dusted off a copy of FreeUndelete 2.0, a freeware data recovery program for deleted files.

I nervously pointed it at the camera’s flash drive and pressed the scan button. A couple of seconds later, which felt like an eternity, “Et voilà? Je te domine” it worked!! Data found and recovered. All pictures intact. Yay!

FreeUndelete didn’t exactly save my life, but it did save last night’s pictures. I can definitely recommend this program for eventualities like this.

They will be up soon.

Now to figure out how to get all the other data back from that busted hard-drive.