Ahh, the memory …

The first step that I was going to undertake in my newly forced liberation from the firm – was to FINALLY reorganize terabytes of data from my 25 years in this profession…

Until recently – this treasure trove of historical data had been spread across multiple drives.

Most of these drives either became too small, or were harvested from failing PCs across the decades. Which is all well and good. I’m a fairly responsible archivist (and horrible digital packrat).

Everything prior to my last 6 years is reasonably saved and after limited shuffling, easy enough to access in a single location. And all the daily use tools and templates are safely packed away and backed up nightly.

Now for the problem…

The 4TB drive where it was being archived lost the partition due to a series of laptop crashes and bad luck.

I was in process of creating a new home for everything when it all went to a final level of bad. No longer spins up, no longer mounts, and only shows up on my Mac as having a USB port location. On Windows – its an unallocated drive – but I’ll be damned if I’m going to partition it. I need the last 6 years of project archives and work history.

SO, over the last week or so – my entire existence has been R&D of recovery tools and a blind hope that one of these methods is going to work (before I get another crash and have to start over again).

Its more detailed than that… I removed the PCB board, cleaned contacts, made sure it does actually still spin, etc… all the ‘next level’ things that someone with a knack for building and rebuilding computers. Just never have rebuilt a drive. 

I’m trying to come to terms with the future being in limbo, and now the recent past has joined a level of uncertainty. It’s untenable to put it mildly. Ahhh the memory.

JM