plummer kids Me, my sister and my brother

Last week my sister sent messaged me about a failed drive from which she needed some files recovered. She is pretty savvy with computers. She's pretty savvy with most things. Not only that, but she has never used me for free tech support, so I knew this had to be important. She explained that twenty years worth of files from her career as a Methodist pastor were on the drive, her "whole life" as she put it. I told her she could send me the drive, and I'd see what I could do. I didn't lecture her about backups or anything like that.

Over the years, I've been approached by more than one crying person holding a USB drive or a laptop. I've seen people lose the only copy of their not yet submitted master's thesis, the only copy of their wedding video and twenty years worth of lesson plans by one unfortunate middle school teacher. Sometimes I've been able to rescue files but more frequently, despite my best efforts, I haven't been able to help people who have asked, despite badly wanting to.

My sister's drive arrived by mail tonight. It was a 2TB Western Digital external hard drive with a USB3 connector. I added an adaptor and plugged it into my laptop, and it mounted immediately, a good sign. It was formatted with an NTFS (Windows) file system. Unfortunately, instead of showing me the file system, I just got a message that said, "Drive Not Available." That was not a good sign.

The data recovery application I own is called Disk Drill. I'm a Mac user, but the company that makes it also has a Windows version. Disk Drill scanned the drive, and it was able to see files on it. It wanted me to make a byte for byte copy, but I didn't have another 2TB drive on hand. I had two 1TB hard drives and a dual drive bay, though. I used the Mac disk utility to combine the two physical drives into one logical drive and tried to initiate the copy again, but still got a message that the drive was too small. Since I knew that there was less than 100 GB of actual data on the drive, I was able to adjust the size of the number of bytes to be copied and the backup started. Although data seemed to be moving quickly, the progress indicator said the backup would take 28 hours. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Rather than doing a byte for byte copy, which also includes empty space, I elected to Disk Drill's recovery option instead. I initiated it and began to copy files, sometimes quickly and at other times seeming to stop. I got messages about the disk having physical damage, but the program never quit. After about 90 minutes, I had 86K files recovered.

I called my sister and asked her to identify the most critical files and folders so that we could see if they were among the rescued files. They were. She lives just over 100 miles from me, so we agreed that I would begin to upload the data to my Google Drive and that I'd send her a link when it was done. As gently as humanly possible, I suggested that she start keeping two copies of her files. She explained to me that the situation was complicated.

In the process of being assigned a new church, she discovered that her laptop, which is indeed hers and not the property of her employer, had been set up by the tech folks at the church she was leaving to use their One Drive. She had not been aware of that and didn't discover it until she went to look for her personal files and discovered they weren't available through the user profile she now had access to. She got temporary access to the old account and copied her files onto her external drive and then deleted them. And then, of course, the drive failed.

That's where I entered the story, a story that looks like it is going to have a happy ending. My sister has done a lot for me and my kids over the years. Being able to do this for her is just me repaying some of the karmic debt I've incurred. Always celebrate your victories, like I'm celebrating this one.

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