Deleting partition: 5 seconds remaining…

 or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust the Cloud (for some things)
 

This picture should make sense in a few paragraphs


 I’m in the process of installing Windows 7 and Ubuntu onto my aging MacBook so I don’t have to go to the engineering building every time I need to use Windows.  I backed up my operating system onto one external drive and my music and photos to another.  That way, once I was done I could delete the copy of the OS but retain a backup of the music and pictures. 

Everything was going well:  The computer was running quickly, I had all my DropBox  stuff back (more on that later…), and I was waiting on updates to download.  I had the disk utility running because I was planning out how I wanted to divide up the external once everything was done.  Normally, you must confirm that you want to continue before anything happens.  Which is good.  However, apparently deleting a partition requires no confirmation.  Which is very bad because first of all that’s just inconsistent, and second the partition that was deleted roughly 5 seconds later housed all of my music and every picture I have taken in about 5 years.

It was shocking how quickly it happened.  I knew enough to immediately stop all reading and writing to the drive, since this could ruin my chances of getting anything back.  Fun fact:  deleting a file (or a section of your hard drive) is a lot like burning a map.  The destination still (presumably) exists but you can’t necessarily find your way there anymore.  However, the computer then considers the space that that file was occupying to be empty and therefore it might write over it with new data.

To summarize the next few days (which honestly involved huge amounts of waiting around) I bought some expensive software and got nearly everything back and I learned a lot about data recovery. The music was a cinch (had it on my iPod) but the photos all needed to be sorted, which took forever.

Of course my email and other online accounts were all untouched, but I also didn’t have to worry about my school work, resumes, code I had written, and a few other important odds and ends.  That stuff was all on DropBox: safe and sound the entire time.  And after all of this, I think I am going to be using them even more.  It’s extremely convenient, and this marks the second time it has essentially saved my life.  Hard drives die.  People make mistakes.  Computers (and especially flash drives) get stolen.  Sometimes you overwrite the wrong file.  There are countless ways to lose everything on your computer.

I’m not too paranoid about cloud storage but that’s because I don’t keep anything too sensitive there.  If someone got into my photos or homework, they wouldn’t have too much of my personal information.  Sure, I’m not going to put my tax returns on DropBox, but for anything that isn’t confidential, it’s great.   So if you haven’t checked it out, maybe you should.  2Gb isn’t TONS of space, but it is free and they have lots of ways to increase that amount without paying anything.  For example, if you use this link, you’ll start out at 2.5Gb instead.

Moral of the story:  back up your data. Somehow.  Storage is cheap:  I saw a 500Gb drive for sale the other day for $45, and I am sure there are better deals than that.  There is excellent free backup software available. But more importantly, once you have both of those, you have to actually do it.  I have all the tools, and I still don’t backup nearly as frequently as I should because it’s kind of a pain in the ass.  That’s another selling point for DropBox: Everything you put in your DropBox folder on your computer is automatically backed up for you and you don’t have to mess with cables or remember to do anything.  Just back it all up somehow, because you might not be as lucky as I was.