Creative Data Loss

lewiz writes "An interesting article from the BBC about the crazy things people do when they accidentally delete files. Amazingly one guy froze his hard disk in an effort to retrieve files. Real men don't make backups... but, hell, who needs to if you can resurrect them from the dead ;)"

Comments

Freezing hard disks

[RonnyJ]

Amazingly one guy froze his hard disk in an effort to retrieve files.

I'm surprised to see this - a friend did this successfully to get his hard drive working for a while, and I've seen a fair amount of other people reporting success with it on the internet.

Anyone else?

Hard Drive in the Freezer

[vlauria]

I actually did that on a WD scsii hard drive last year. It failed on me and had important data on it. I wasn't willing to shill out a few hundred to a few grand to get it fixed, so I found a few articles commenting about how the clicking noise I was hearing was problems related to the mechanics of the drive and there was a chance I could salvage my hard drive by placing in the freezer.

I thought, "Well, the data is lost anyway, so why not?" I put it in a ziplock bag, so not to get the platters all frosty, and left it in overnight. I woke up the next morning and put it back into my computer, and wouldn't you know it, absolutly nothing except for the same clicking errors I heard the day before.

Thanks Internet, you've once again provided me with more information that I really needed.

Lost my financials

[xant]

I once lost a year's worth of gnucash xml data, including all the backups (and gnucash makes plenty--a new one every time you use it!). I promptly used dd /dev/hda1|grep to search for markers that I knew would be in a gnucash file, and with a little shell scripting found the original and every single backup file in deleted space. After determining with a little more fancier grepping which blocks represented my most recently updated file, I recovered that, trimmed off a bit of the filesystem cruft around the edges, and had my file back.

Then I promptly set up a system to encrypt and email myself the most recent file, every day. :-)

(Yes, I'm aware that there are programs that will do the same thing for me.)

Okay, user's fault?

[SharpFang]

I've attached my Amiga harddrive to a PC at work. For a few days I've been succesfully using my home system by mounting the drive under linux as AFFS and then using the mounted directories as volumes under UAE, emulating Amiga just like the one I had at home. Then I got that idea of looking how does Windows see it.
I booted NT, Disk Manager and it displayed a requester with something along this lines:
"The drive contains invalid/corrupt signature and can't be read. Windows is about to write a correct signature. This is an absolutely safe operation and won't change the way of accessing the disk by other operating systems in any way. Do you wish to proceed?".
So, I clicked yes.
Result: 6 hours of recovering of erased Amiga partition table. Absolutely safe my ass, fucking Microsoft liars.