Friday, April 8, 2016

A Special Report Part Two

Editor's Note: This special report initially began as an entry in the table on the page I use on this blog to track the Reconversion project. However, due to the desire to write an extended essay, I moved the text to a blog post. The Reconversion page is located here.

I'll be honest now and say the fact that I had been moving files from the MyCloud drive to this new drive instead of copying files was idiotic. I should have copied the files to the new drive, done my organization work, and then made a backup. The problem, though, is that the MyCloud drive is a 4 TB drive and the new drive is a 4 TB drive. I would have needed to still remove all of the files on the MyCloud in order to wipe it clean so I could delete all the Shares on it, which was the whole point of moving the files off of it.

I only mention this because it was not smart to be doing all of this work I had been doing without a backup. That's the bottomline - I should know better. After all, I work with files and computers daily and cannot count the number of times I needed a backup of the work I just finished. I used to be really good about making backups. At Quintrex, every Friday, I would run a DOS batch file in order to copy all of my documentation files that I had on my C:\ drive to BSS's PC (because his PC had a CD burner while mine only had a CD player). Then I would burn a backup, which required multiple CDs to do.

The fact that I may have lost the music files that were created by ripping CDs is not a terribly big deal. Yes, it means re-doing hours and hours of work but, as I think I've mentioned, my plan has always been to finish the conversion and then audit it by reconverting.

The fact that I had moved a lot of Alex's files and a lot of Megan's files and a lot of Karen's files to the 4 TB EHD without a backup.... that's a terribly big deal. I'll just be brutally honest and say that when Karen and Alex found out about what I had done and that family pictures could be lost, they were furious. I deserved their fury.

In the meantime, I located a lot of JPGs that had not been moved to the 4 TB EHD. In fact, I found a directory of duplicate files - hundreds of files with (2) in the file name. I am in the process of running 7 Robocopy commands to not only consolidate the files I found to a single EHD, but to also make a backup of those files.

My prayers are to update the reconversion page on 4/15/2016 with the good news that Chad was successful in not only recovering the 4 TB EHD, but also in recovering the other two dead EHDs.

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