David Gillon

I've spent the last few days trying to recover the external hard drive I use with my laptop - it got dropped onto the floor when I was in bed post-op, but seemed okay, only the next time I came to use it 'Do you wish to format this volume'. Aiee!

Normally any vital files have copies on both the laptop and the harddrive, but space on the laptop's internal drive has been so tight recently, and the planned replacement of the laptop so imminent, that I hadn't been as systematic about taking copies. The one thing I really didn't want to lose was a set of notes for a potential novel that I'd been working on for the past couple of months. No actual text as yet, but lots of character notes and a lot of background. The kind of thing that would be replaceable, but a pain to do so. And a couple of spreadsheets I'd been noodling around with, and so on.

So about a fortnight ago I sat down with my laptop and the drive and Get Back Data for NTFS (which has already saved me a couple of times), and started trying to recover stuff. I had problems the first few times, which I finally figured out was the software not being happy when the laptop went into its sleep mode - larger discs means it's now taking longer to run and that's become an issue, but I finally bumped the sleep mode up to after 10 hours and got a decent recovery run out of it on Friday.

As far as I can see I've only lost a few files, and they are ones I have multiple copies of anyway. The files I was really worried about I've managed to recover and been able to work on. And so the weekend was occupied with copying stuff onto my other external hard-drive, with a little bit of trimming here and there for files that weren't needed. And late yesterday I called it done.

At some point I will have to reformat the laptop external drive, It should be fine once it's figured out which sectors to avoid, and I need a portable drive, but paranoia will probably make me leave it a month or two, just in case I need to go back and hunt for something. And as soon as I hooked the larger drive back up to the desktop machine it started clicking and whirring, which didn't fill me full of confidence. So maybe it's time to invest in another external drive to ensure I have backup of the backup!

But thank god for Get Back Data for NTFS! That's at least the third time it's recovered a drive for me.