Hard Drive Progress

There’s promising news about the photos on my dead hard drive! I finally sent in my hard drive to Ontrack Data Recovery Services a couple weeks ago (on their dime via UPS, but I’m sure that’s rolled into the $495 photo recovery fee), and last week I got word back from them. My hard drive needed to be taken apart in a clean room (which I figured would be the case), but they were able to image 87% of the drive. With the method they had to use in order to retrieve the files, they said they weren’t able to retain any of the filenames on my photos, but they were able to recover 83-84 GB of photos! I don’t remember how much total space all my photos occupied when my hard drive crashed, but that’s gotta be the vast majority, if not all, of my photos! Ordinarily, Ontrack would just burn the recovered photos onto DVD and mail them back to me for free (again, included in the total cost, no doubt), but because there was so much recovered data, they asked me either to ship them an external hard drive, or to buy one from them, onto which they could put my recovered photos. So on Thursday night last week I went down to Best Buy and bought a 500-GB Iomega firewire/USB2.0 external drive for $160 (I was gonna buy that anyway pretty soon), and then shipped it to Ontrack (on my dime) on Friday morning. They got it today, so while it’s possible I could get my hard drive and my photos back before I leave for New Orleans on Monday morning, I’ll almost certainly have them by the time I go home for Thanksgiving! It’ll be quite a relief to have my photos back. It’ll take awhile to go back through and rename the photos that weren’t backed up on my other external hard drive over the past year or so. That reminds me, I still need to pull those back over to my laptop…
And for some various countdowns I have going on:
2+ days until my friend Mike M. flies in from Wisconsin to visit for the weekend!
5 days until I fly to New Orleans for the CBD conference
6 days until I present at the CBD conference
9+ days until I fly back to State College from the CBD conference
10+ days until I witness Penn State hopefully beat Michigan State at Beaver Stadium and thereby clinch at least a berth in the Rose Bowl!
11 days until I start the drive home for Thanksgiving break (and see Alex again)!
12+ days until I arrive home in Wisconsin and see my family again!