Lost data, where art thou?

For at least a year, I’ve been running Genie Timeline as backup software. I was quite happy with software that detects changed files and backs them up right away. You get up to the minute backup status so that at any given time, if your system fails you’ll have the latest version (and maybe an older version or two) of your files.

Back in May or so I decided it was time to format the hard drive and reinstall windows for the same reason everyone else does every 6 or so months. Especially with kids using the computer. I ensured I had everything backed up, formatted the hard drive, reinstalled everything (including Genie Timeline) and lo and behold: it would not recognize my backups. Not 5 minutes before the same software at the same version performed that very backup, but would not recognize it.

?!

So I did the next best thing and dug into the backup itself (which is stored by merely copying the files and their respective directory structures to the backup drive) and manually copied out all the files. They were all there, no big whoop; it was just stupid that I couldn’t do this with the software.

Fast forward to this past Friday: Katie noticed our December 2010 folder had all of 6 pictures in it. Where’s Christmas morning? Where’s the movies I shot? Gone. All gone.

Best I can figure, after the backup was “restored in it’s entirety” I installed a new WD drive and began using that for the backup, fat dumb and happy that all my files were intact and being backed up to the new drive. The old drive was then repurposed to serve as my Macbook backup so I didn’t have my old backups to see if Christmas was even there. I ran Recuva (which has done excellent things for me in the past, even from SD cards) but it wasn’t able to find anything. The sectors were likely overwritten already.

Damn it.

Advertisement