Toward the end of April I had one of the hard drives that I have in a Raid 5 configuration fail on my main work station. When it failed, it created what I am guessing to be a current spike that damaged the another drive that was on the same SATA hub. Raid 5 will protect your system from data loss if, you loose one drive, if you loose more than one at the same time you are pretty much screwed unless you have a seperate back up going for your data.

My main back up for my workstation and data has been my Windows Home Server which is attached to my office network. Again, as luck would have it – that would be bad luck, back in 2011, unbeknownst to me, the WHS system decided to no longer back up my main data storage drive (the aforementioned Raid 5 Array). I had previously moved all of my older project files (2010 and earlier) to a seperate USB hard drive, and fortunately I found another external drive that I had copied all of my 2011-12 files last February. Unfortunately, I had planned on using that drive for another project, so I had erased it, but had not reformatted it, nor had I written to it after it was erased. I found a neat little recovery program that has allowed me to recover all of the erased files and write them to another external hard drive.

So I have most all of my data recovered, unfortunately all 960,000 or so files were recovered but all of the folder structure was lost, and since the hard drive had been used as an incremental back up, I had 3 to 6 copies of the same files. So for the past several weeks I have been spending my free time trying to sort everything out, rename and classify all of my images, artwork and documents. I think you have the idea. A couple of weeks ago my patience wore thin and I decided to let the computer just set there for awhile, while I got back to work on the wagon.

I am happy to say that my mental health has improved and I have gotten a fair amount of work done on the Dodge!

Moral to the story … back up everything and then back up the back ups!

I still havent finished squaring the mess away, but I have got it straightened out enough that I can once again process photos and up date my websites/blogs. My 1st task is getting my personal blog updated and then I have a bunch of updates that I need to do for the OTHG-Phoenix Website. I dont even what to talk about the almost 1500 email messages that have piled up since all this happened. Hopefully I can get caught up on my correspondence by Christmas! Thanks to everyone for their patience and understanding!