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Rant: I scrubbed a client's drive with the wrong formatting option and lost a folder of wedding photos
Last Tuesday I was fixing a slow Dell at my bench, and the guy wanted a clean reinstall before he sold it. I popped in my USB and picked the quick format option on the data drive without reading the label twice, because I assumed it was the backup drive and not the main one. Turns out the backup was the 1TB drive and the 500GB was his actual photo archive, and quick format still wipes the file table. I tried Recuva and PhotoRec for about three hours, and I pulled back maybe 60 percent of the JPEGs before the drive started throwing read errors. The client was cool about it, said the wedding pics were also on his phone, but I still felt like garbage for two days. Now I unplug every drive except the target before I touch a partition tool, and I slap a piece of blue painter's tape on the tower that says KEEP. Anyone else have a close call like that, and do you trust the paid recovery tools over the free ones when it counts?
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williamw7510d ago
Funny how the same thing happens to all of us with labels. People tape "DO NOT TOUCH" signs on office fridges and the milk still vanishes. My neighbor writes FRAGILE in giant letters on boxes and the movers stack bricks on top anyway. We read what we expect to see, not what's actually written, and a drive just sitting there looks like every other drive. That's why your painter's tape trick works better than any label, because you have to physically peel it off before you can mess up. Sounds dumb but it forces your brain to stop for one second.
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