Man am I in some Hot Water!

[godale03]

Well... guys, I have learned a hard lesson this past weekend. I am actually quite embarassed considering I do this for a living.

My wife asked me to rebuild our PC this past weekend. It has been acting up a bit and it has been a while since it's last rebuild. I told her sure I would, but I would like her to sit down and backup everything she wanted backed up, because I have no idea what she has on that thing.

Well after she backed everything up to our external HD I sat down to get started. My first mistake was picking a time to do this while I was also responsible for watching my baby girl. My wife left to run some errands and the baby was asleep so I figured it was a good time. Well I started rushing through the processes.... Loading the XP CD and then deleting the patitions and so on. Well like an idiot I did not unplug the external HD so that Windows did not pick it up as a valid partition. Well rushing through everything so that I could get the formatting started before the baby woke up, I deleted the partition on the first drive listed.... the 80GB external HD. Almost immediately afterward my brain says to me.... hey, Dumbass!! Your primary drive is 150GB... not 80GB! My stomach jumped into my throat, and I immediately turned ghost white. I just deleted the back up! 6 years of my stepsons life... gone. 10 years of my wifes pictures, gone. All of our financial info, accounts, balances, reciepts, purchases, investment accounts that were part of the money backups... Gone! Password spreadsheet with all of our different passwords for email accounts, insurance accounts... and so on... Gone!!! All Gone!!

I thought my wife was going to kill me! I felt like crap to say the least. When my wife asked my how sure I was.... and I told her 100% she was not real happy. Well I downloaded a copy of Recover my Files and it is still running, 12 hours later, and it is only 50% done searching. It has found something like 20,000 some files and counting. I just hope it pulls the photos off ok. It is a pretty good piece of software so I am hopefull. If this does not work... I am sending it to the West Coast and I will have to pay anywhere from $350 to $1500 to have a proffesional recover my data.

Lesson learned! In the 12 plus years I have been doing this, I have never had data loss due to my neglagence... of course the first time it happened it had to happen to me! LOL

Tom

 

[RCnut]

man, thats gotta suck !! i dont know what i would do if i lost it all.

 

[beason]

i have used those recovery programs with some luck in the past, but i have never tried it after deleting the partition. i used active undelete, and it recovered about 50% of the files someone had deleted AND emptied the recycle bin...

let us know how well it goes.

 

[godale03]

Hey Beson... supposedly according to their site it will recover even after a partion deletion, and even after a complete format.... however time will tell if I am successful. I did not format... only deleted the partition, so I hope the data is still there. I will post the result hopefully today. It has been running for over 12 hours now and is only half way done. For my sake, I hope it works. The program comes highly rated.

 

[WoodiE]

If all you did was run the setup and deleted the partitions on the external drive why can't you load back into windows on the main drive on the computer and re-backup everything? Or am I missing something else here?

 

[MrClean]

Man that sucks, I can only imagine how you felt when you realized what it was doing. I've had good luck recovering pictures and files with those programs. I think they work as long as nothing has been written back to the drive since the delete occurred (at least that's what the program stated when I bought it). Good luck Tom.................. good thing you did this AFTER buying your E-Revo .

 

[godale03]

If all you did was run the setup and deleted the partitions on the external drive why can't you load back into windows on the main drive on the computer and re-backup everything? Or am I missing something else here?

Sorry... I forgot to mention... I am running two HD... I thought I was deleting both the internals, which was the plan. One of the drives happened to be the External. So I deleted the main and backup in the same big mistake. That was the first plan wast to just go back and re-backup... but the main was gone too. Sorry about that... sometimes I get typing faster than the brain works.

The fact of the matter is that I should not have been doing this build while trying to look after my daughter at the same time. I rushed through and was not paying attention.

 

[CharliesTheMan]

I've had good luck with recovery software as well. I've also sent some HD's to the pros when I was doing some minor computer work on the side to support my habit (RC's lol). The work that they did on two different occasions was amazing. One of the hard drives was external. The lady deleted the backup that was on it, lost all the information, and started a new backup writing over about half of the space. Miraculously, they recovered the original data AND the new backup that had started to write over the old stuff. I think that one cost about $500, and it was cool cuz she was a milf and had some really sexxy pics that I happened to come across lol.

 

[RCnut]

i know you saved those pics Charlie !! post em up !!

 

[godale03]

Maybe I need to start doing some more PC work on the side! LOL

J/K

Thanks my friend. I hope my luck is good as well. I think my life may depend on it!

 

[WoodiE]

Sorry... I forgot to mention... I am running two HD... I thought I was deleting both the internals, which was the plan. One of the drives happened to be the External. So I deleted the main and backup in the same big mistake. That was the first plan wast to just go back and re-backup... but the main was gone too. Sorry about that... sometimes I get typing faster than the brain works.

The fact of the matter is that I should not have been doing this build while trying to look after my daughter at the same time. I rushed through and was not paying attention.

That sucks dude - I've used Acronis disk director in the past and have had good luck with it. Might be worth a try if your above program doesn't work.

 

[godale03]

That sucks dude - I've used Acronis disk director in the past and have had good luck with it. Might be worth a try if your above program doesn't work.

I have used Acronis True Image alot to build PC's in bulk. It is a great program. If this one doesn't work I will give Disk Director a try. Thanks man.

 

[T-Maxx Monster]

dang. did the same thing and deleted my sis's pics. she was pretty pissed...sorry to hear that.

 

[godale03]

Did I also mention that I also lost every single picture from the birth of my daughter to now. I tell you guys... if I can't get this data back, I am screwed.

 

[joneser4u]

i know the external HD is nice but you may wanna consider backing everything to a disk as well. alittle more time consuming but you can stash the dish in a safe place and it will always be there.

ya, i learned the hard way also.

 

[GrudgE]

Well your not alone my friend I did the same thing less then a month ago. Luckily though I back-up all my pics and my wife's files to dvd about once a month. So I only lost a month of pics and files. She was still pissed but, she got over it.

 

[godale03]

Yeah.... I should know better. I don't know a whole lot about disaster recovery... but I know one thing I should have done.... had a back up of the back up. Pictures will be archived to DVD from now on, along with the normal back up.

 

[beason]

i got dibbs on your e revo if she goes postal on you!!

J/K man. you should be able to recover most if not all of the data. deleting the partition isnt so bad. you didnt write over the files on the drive, windows just doesn't know where they are at. the program should find them fine.

 

[marauder]

External website, dvd copies in both a fireproof safe and in a postal safe box...NEVER keep important things on a pc that you use regularly, and never only have 1 copy in 1 centralized location. Always have a backup somewhere distant from your main data files. In the event of a natural disaster or house fire, your backup files will be safe in their home at the bank or post office. When I did bookkeeping we always backed up our data on tape and sent 1 copy home with the owner's wife and the other copy stayed in a giant vault. Believe it or not, this came in handy...as we lost everything one day due to a server crash one week followed by a backup server crash the next...bad times.

I hope you recover everything, and may the force be with you if not.

 

[godale03]

I just got back from lunch and since I go home for lunch... I decided to check on the progress. Well it has been 17 hours since I started the search and it has found over 21,000 files. The good news is that it has found 3600 pictures and the best part is that I can preview them. I was able to look at pictures that I thought were going to be very expensive to recover. My wife is going to be thrilled! The bad news.... it has yet to recover my MS Money backup files. It still has about a quarter of the way to go, so maybe it just hasn't found it yet. Wife is not going to be happy about that.