January 2015 – Macinations

January 29, 2015

Over 10 TB and 600,000 files recovered

The Great Disk Recovery of ’15 is almost complete and so far I have recovered over 10TB worth of data which accounts for over 600,000 files. It’s taken days and a couple of new drives added to the scheme, but ALL the data has been salvaged. All the movies, music, documents and pictures have been recovered and are all viewable once more. Whether or not this was a system glitch or some user error on my part, the fact remains 5 drives had damaged partitions and weren’t recognized as readable by Windows. A simple "undelete" wasn’t possible so it was a pretty serious SNAFU. But GetData Recover My Files has done a perfect job of getting those files back. I even saw files I deleted 6 months ago that could still be recovered. In fact, some of them were because it was easier to select the entire volumes rather than hunt and peck over a couple of folders. Good heavens […]

January 27, 2015

A closer look at the Amazon Echo

So let’s take a few minutes to have a closer look at the Amazon Echo and go over what’s good and what needs work and who would benefit from such a device. First off, the device is heavily reliant on Amazon Prime. Obviously, this is the first group that is allowed to buy it, so if you’re not keen on Amazon Prime and don’t see the benefit, Echo clearly isn’t the right device for you. The Echo is really a device to push the benefits of Amazon Prime Music which I think will develop into a pretty good service. Amazon has vastly improved Prime for shipping and the catalog for Prime Instant Video continues to grow. I have no reason to doubt their music collection won’t grow and many more albums will be available under the Prime umbrella. To that end, Echo is a nice way to hook into that service. You can easily talk to the device or you […]

January 25, 2015

Two drives restored, three to go

So the fallout from my hard drive failure continues. So far, I’ve got 2 drives actually recovered with 3 more to go. The files are now being copied back to their original location and that is going to take a long time. Additionally, I need the other 5TB drive in order to keep going. I’ve used up all my spares so I can’t recover anything more at the moment. The original drives have been formatted and tested for errors and it will take 24+ hours to copy all the data back. Everything is working quite nicely so far. Recover My Files has worked magic in getting my files back and I feel like I’m in the home stretch. The other drives are smaller, so the recovery time shouldn’t be nearly bad. Unfortunately, they also contain a slew of pictures that need to come back. I have full confidence it will work, but fingers crossed. I have a whole new backup […]

January 24, 2015

Amazon Echo and Amazon Music Subscription

So with this hard drive SNAFU comes a hard lesson. I do have backups, but clearly not enough. I have another 5TB hard drive coming so I can sync my most important data to a second location. That will kick in on Tuesday night when the new drive shows up. But it also got my thinking. I bought the new Amazon Echo and think it’s a pretty neat little device. I’ve had it playing all sorts of music since I got it and it does so quite well. I found all sorts of albums in the Prime Music Library and even uploaded a few of my own CDs to listen to. I can only upload 250 songs, which to be honest is quite a bit for me, but there is a second option to upload 250,000 for a mere $25 a year. At first, it didn’t really seem worth it. I have the discs and while it may take awhile […]

January 23, 2015

How do you recover 10TB worth of data from damaged partitions?

It’s pretty much inevitable that a hard drive is going to crash and take all your precious data with it. It’s also inevitable that you’re going to select the wrong file or folder and click the wrong button which sends your data into a black hole. It’s pretty easy to recover from accidentally deleted files. The Deleted Items folder can save you and programs like Recuva can dig deeper and restore your files. But what happens when the Partition Table is utterly mangled by Windows itself and the drive is no longer seen as readable? What do you do when you plug in that 5TB external drive and Windows sits like a dumb oaf and doesn’t show a single file? Well, this is what has just happened to me. Windows has corrupted the partition and file table of 10TB worth of hard drives that are now considered unreadable. Tens of thousands of pictures, documents, ISO images and music files have […]

Over 10 TB and 600,000 files recovered

A closer look at the Amazon Echo

Two drives restored, three to go

Amazon Echo and Amazon Music Subscription

How do you recover 10TB worth of data from damaged partitions?

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