Recovered 15 Years of Data (20th January 2013)

Just after Xmas 2012 every file I had made, every program I installed and every e-mail on this laptop was lost. But there is good news, everybody! It’s just about back to normal, with the only real casuality being my e-mail archives.

December 2012’s business paperwork is mostly lost. The actual work is always saved to a computer or file server owned by the company I am working for that day. Asking colleagues nicely to forward my own paperwork to me should mean I get all the financial records I need. All my current accounts have online banking and my big money graph is intact from November 2012.

E-mail

All the entries for my e-mails are present but most of the content is garbage. Some of the original text survives between random data and broken formatting, like fragments of pottery in a Time Team trench.

Various to-do lists were in my e-mail, including extensive plans for my GTA2 maps and missions. A lot of ideas are lost along with my blogging plan and product research notes. A lot of GTA bug reports are scribbled in a notepad during games so I still have that.

Hobbies

The GTA stuff I’ve made, including the past versions. All my websites were in a backup from November 2011. I downloaded the stuff I remember changing during December 2012 but should do a full comparison between local and live.

15 Years Saved

So all in all, relatively unscathed. It has taken 3 solid weeks of painstaking work to retrieve almost all the work, hobbies and memories. Well worth it. Ended up doing a lot more of it myself than using tech support professionals.

  1. Laptop!
  2. Received It!
  3. File Transfers with USB Stick
  4. Full Administrator Account!
  5. Installing Firefox
  6. Installing Games
  7. Reducing Processes
  8. WiFi Gaming
  9. E-mail
  10. Backups, Old & New
  11. Desk Arrangements
  12. Migrating Music
  13. Mobile Phone Archive
  14. Web Developer Setup
  15. Printing
  16. Putting Old PC Out To Pasture
  17. Stopping the Magical Edges
  18. Disk Cleanup
  19. FTPuse Integrates Seamlessly
  20. Laptop Performance