Home Again / Electronic Time Capsule
In the 5 or so days I've been home after my 54-day cross-country road trip, I've already gone back to my normal routine. Basically, I'm back to being a computer-slave. But, this time around, I have a new series of projects. Not only do I have the vast chore of sorting and enhancing the 1700 photographs I took on my trip, but there's the DVD of the trip involved as well. My folks have projects for me already so I'm suddenly quite busy.
I've also already been back to my most recent former workplace twice already. When they found out I was back in town, I was practically dragged in to visit. It's like I never left, it's strange. I mean, in all honesty, I couldn't possibly expect things to change at all because of little ol' me, but it's nice to see that things are just fine without me. I take great comfort in that because I know that there were times, especially during the move, when I was indispensable and it's good that flow has improved to where they don't desperately need me on a professional level anymore. On a personal level, though, that's another story. Many of them were quite excited at asking me to come back and some were adamant. I don't think they'd put up many barriers to let me start working there again.
Several years ago, 2002 or so, I had 40 GB hard drive that I used as a secondary media drive. Had everything that wasn't the operating system on it. Movies, music, sound files, data of all kinds. Then, one day, it started acting funny. Immediately, it stopped working all together. When I tried turning it on, it only made clicking noises. The Click of Death, as I came to know it by. The drive, with all it's precious data, was dead. I contacted data recovery businesses and all wanted around $1,500 to retrieve the data.
I don't even remember what's on the drive anymore. I kept it all this time in the hopes that one day I could either afford the data recovery or some new technique would be developed to fix it myself. Imagine what's on it. An electronic time capsule filled with thousands of trinkets and everything that I can't remake. Radio shows from my days at KEOL, panoramic video files of my old dorm rooms, audio clips from my college friends, my old MP3 collection, movie trailers from the late 90's and my collection of data from the development of my failed computer game, Beyond Aurora. That stuff is irreplaceable. Getting it back would be worth it, but not worth $1,500.
So I made it worth $35.
I found a duplicate drive on eBay earlier this week for only $35 bucks. It just arrived in the mail today. I shall spend the weekend doing some Frankenstein work by taking the good, data rich platters out of the bad old drive and placing them into the working drive from eBay. The hope is that the new drive will spin the old platters correctly and the data will be read for the first time in years. I believe this is how data recovery operations do it and charge people $1,500 for it. I'm no expert, but I only need it to work for a couple hours so I can suck the data off onto a newer, working drive. I hope this works. I don't have any other ideas and I'm fresh out of $1,500.
I've also already been back to my most recent former workplace twice already. When they found out I was back in town, I was practically dragged in to visit. It's like I never left, it's strange. I mean, in all honesty, I couldn't possibly expect things to change at all because of little ol' me, but it's nice to see that things are just fine without me. I take great comfort in that because I know that there were times, especially during the move, when I was indispensable and it's good that flow has improved to where they don't desperately need me on a professional level anymore. On a personal level, though, that's another story. Many of them were quite excited at asking me to come back and some were adamant. I don't think they'd put up many barriers to let me start working there again.
Several years ago, 2002 or so, I had 40 GB hard drive that I used as a secondary media drive. Had everything that wasn't the operating system on it. Movies, music, sound files, data of all kinds. Then, one day, it started acting funny. Immediately, it stopped working all together. When I tried turning it on, it only made clicking noises. The Click of Death, as I came to know it by. The drive, with all it's precious data, was dead. I contacted data recovery businesses and all wanted around $1,500 to retrieve the data.
I don't even remember what's on the drive anymore. I kept it all this time in the hopes that one day I could either afford the data recovery or some new technique would be developed to fix it myself. Imagine what's on it. An electronic time capsule filled with thousands of trinkets and everything that I can't remake. Radio shows from my days at KEOL, panoramic video files of my old dorm rooms, audio clips from my college friends, my old MP3 collection, movie trailers from the late 90's and my collection of data from the development of my failed computer game, Beyond Aurora. That stuff is irreplaceable. Getting it back would be worth it, but not worth $1,500.
So I made it worth $35.
I found a duplicate drive on eBay earlier this week for only $35 bucks. It just arrived in the mail today. I shall spend the weekend doing some Frankenstein work by taking the good, data rich platters out of the bad old drive and placing them into the working drive from eBay. The hope is that the new drive will spin the old platters correctly and the data will be read for the first time in years. I believe this is how data recovery operations do it and charge people $1,500 for it. I'm no expert, but I only need it to work for a couple hours so I can suck the data off onto a newer, working drive. I hope this works. I don't have any other ideas and I'm fresh out of $1,500.