Woke up Wednesday. fed the cats, turned on my computer to check email... instead of the expected whirrrRRR!!!! of the Raptor spinning up, I heard the dread Click Of Death.
Dead C drive.
Luckily, all my development files are on the D drive; the C drive only holds installed applications and my email data files. And, besides I have two different backup sets (bi-weekly incremental and monthly full). Even better, I just happened to make an image of that C drive, back in January. I am prepared!
So, I pulled the Raptor, dropped in the image and booted to a perfectly functional (if not 100% up to date) system. Ta-da!
Next, to grab Tuesday night's email backups off the NAS and put the whole incident out of mind.
Except... the backup program says the latest email files it has are from... 2008. "Fuck you," I say. "Rebuild your index, re-catalog your thingy, figure out what you have!" "OK," says the program, "That will take four hours." "Whatever. Do it!" I shout. It chugs away while I go to work.
When I return home, it has rebuilt its catalog. "What say you?" I demand.
It replies, "The latest email files I have are from... 2008."
"Fuck you," I say.
So I bring home the full backup set, which I keep on a USB drive that lives in my desk at work. "Fetch me the files I require!" I say to the backup program. "I must rebuild the catalog files for this backup set," it says. "That will take another five hours."
"Fine! Do it!" I command. While it works, I drink a lot of wine. And some Glenlivet.
It whirs and chugs for five hours, then replies "OK, the latest email files I have are from... 2008."
"FUCK YOU!" I say, to the backup program.
"FUCK YOU!" I say to the universe.
"FUCK! YOU!"
But, 2008 was an alright year. Why not go with the flow and move there?
not a bad idea.
plus i’ll never turn 40, that way. i can just stay 38 forever.
You use some local email storage for personal emails? Not Outlook? Please, tell me it ain’t so! Time to switch to gmail (or some other web equivalent) Cleek! Let The Cloud take care of your important personal data! Nothing could go wrong!
I hope you find the missing emails mate.
“FUCK YOU!”, I say to The Cloud.
FUCK YOU!
problem identified:
in February, i had upgraded Backup Program from v7.6 to v7.7. but i still had v7.6 on the ghosted drive. well, it turns out that v7.6 can’t read backup files from v7.7. but it doesn’t tell you this, when you tell it to. no, instead of saying “hey , i can’t read this stuff, maybe you should upgrade”, it just makes up some nonsense about files it doesn’t actually have.
fucking programmers….