The lowdown on the disk of doom...

Monday we heard back from OnTrack. They say there's nothing more they can do. It's dead, dead. No bits to scrape off. All gone. Apparently it suffered massive head crash and the surface damage was too severe.

However, there are some other prospects for recovering some of the data. For example, Jen sent her sad tale of woe to the fine folks at Apple, including a note saying she had backed up all of her iTunes in May, but had bought about $40 more since then and had not yet backed up those subsequent purchases. They promptly put the entire set (2 orders) of 1 album and about 25 songs in her purchased queue for re-download! Yay! It probably didn't hurt her case that she mentioned she had replaced her ailing PC with a 12" iBook, or that she had been backing things up on a schedule. So, back up your iTunes and if it still happens to YOU, there might be hope if you write them a nice note.

Jen also has started to write people who may have some of her files. For example, the files for the Musical were usually sent out to Board members or cast members, so someone probably still has a copy. Also, some of them were put on my iBook this summer so she could work with them on vacation. Or on my old laptop (I still have the backups) for the same reason in previous summers. So, we are sifting through what we have and hoping others can fill in some of the gaps. I think this will probably get us about 60% of the stuff.

Some things, like last years Christmas mailout list are probably gone. Although, I think we only did an e-card for most of the people last year so there's a chance I can probaby reconstruct that from the mail log, if I kept it. Her e-mail (since 5/24/2003) is all gone, including her profile and folders. I have an old version of the folder I have to try to coax Thunderbird into using, and the mail aliases we can probably reconstruct because I'm in most of them and have some of the mails. There's a possibility we lost some pictures, but I think that almost all of them are on the web, and those that aren't are on backups of my old laptop because the ones she'd have pulled from the web (to make space, instead of bugging me for more quota!) would have been older pics taken with the Mavica. I used to copy the floppies to my laptop to make more space. Rarely did I ever delete them from the laptop... so it's just a matter of realizing they are "missing" and repopulating.

Her collection of clip art is toast, that wasn't replicated anywhere, but some things, like the MS Office Clip art, and a few others, we have on CD and can actually load. If anyone knows of a good, cheap source of quality clip art, let me know. Christmas is coming, after all... :)

Anyway, it's not the ideal situation but there are still a few things looking up and each day gets a little brighter as she sifts through what she does have and breathes big sighs of relief.

And yes, she has a big backup drive and is using it.