This was going to be a post about the cioppino I ate last night (from the Market). It was going to be about the nice potluck breakfast spread this morning following the Head of the Troll. It was going to be about Head of the Troll.

But, as a result of some pretty stupid user errors, this will be a post about file recovery. I won’t get into what exactly I did, but know that the 27 photos I took today and yesterday … well they aren’t on my camera, and they aren’t on my laptop.

Why wait until you’re screwed? Take this action today:
Download one of several free file-recovery programs available and recommended by sites like Download.com or PC World. A few that I discovered today:

FreeUndelete
PC Inspector Smart Recovery

Unfortunately none of these have been able to help my in my plight today. I fear it’s because I didn’t download them until today. You see, long story short, when you hit Shift-Delete on a file, then click “yes” when the “are you sure” pop up window appears, the file you’ve deleted isn’t actually deleted. It’s stored on your computer but the space is designated as ‘free’ and ready to accept data. So when you, for instance, download a file recovery program, the file you just deleted has probably then been overwritten by the new program/file you’ve just downloaded/saved/etc.

Makes good sense, then, to have a file recovery program on hand. And on a different drive than your C drive (to avoid dangers of overwriting recovery data). Thus, a good task that will take no more than 5 minutes, would be to review one of the programs I’ve mentioned above, and load it on to your USB drive. Then next time disaster strikes, you’ll have something at the ready.

Ok. Back to your regular programming.