Thursday, December 29, 2005

December 29, 2005

After like 6 years of adding and deleting files, and finally organizing my hard drive I figured I should defragment my hard drive. It's something they say you should do every couple of months or so.

But Windows 2000 has no defragment. Windows help tells me to use cleanmgr. I do. The program opens, analyzes my hard drive, then asks me to check some boxes. One is to compress seldom-used files to save room.

When you check it it says: WILL NOT DELETE ANY FILES and is "completely safe".

So I hit OK. I go eat dinner and when I come back...there are now 5 items on my desktop. There used to be like 30. I check windows explorer to see how much room got freed up on my hard drive that only had about 1 gig free.

There are now 55 gigs free. I notice missing folders everwhere. Somehow this horrid program has deleted 54 gigs of stuff.

I have an article for Fangoria magazine that's due next week--it was four pages and Tony Timpone, the editor of Fango had called me up to make sure I could do it by the deadline. That article, and most of my other docs(including the new scene breakdowns and shooting schedule for FOC2) are GONE.

I rarely panic. But inside I was freaking out. All the digital photos I had taken in the past year were gone--including pics of my kid, of my brother-in-laws wedding, of EVERYTHING--gone.

Windows pops up an error telling me that crucial windows files are missing and please insert the windows install disk. Yes, that's right, this program has deleted necessary Windows files among its random deletions.

CUT TO:

Me at the store buying a search and recovery program to attempt to salvage what's still on the hard drive. It managed to find 169,000 files but it doesn't find any names--so I have to individually go through those 169,000 files to figure out which ones are good and which ones are bad.

So that's where I'm at now. I managed to find the Fango article and the FOC2 stuff, so that's good. Will be going through those for weeks.

Moral of the story: Don't run cleanmgr no matter how safe it says it is.