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Ooops!!!

SamuraiBigEd

SamuraiBigEd

Under paid Sasquatch!
Upgrading all the computers to Windows 7 at my business partners other business, a travel agency, and had a major mishap. Archived Outlook and copied the archive.pst and outlook.pst on one system and on two accounts on another, copied them all to respective folders on a USB drive.

Here comes the fun part, the first one only copied the archive, the second the secondary account copied both and the main and most important copied neither!:hmmmm:

Now for the clincher, both systems have been wiped and loaded, did not find out till afterwards when I went to restore all the accounts! :eek:

I should have verified but it showed them copying to the drive and when I dragged and dropped to the correct folders on the drive appears to be when the problems started.

This amounts to 7 months of contracts and correspondence on group trips, time to do this...:vroam:
 
That's the plan, setting up a Drobo FS with 5 3TB drives. No server, but I am going to move everybody over to IMAP and set up a daily incremental backup.
 
Hell, I have 2 businesses and am setting up a third. I am using GApps for my domains b/c it's easy as hell an it's off-site.

As soon as any business starts making enough money to justify it, I'll switch that domain over to a paid GApps for business model, but 1 business is just me and the second is is an LLC of 4 members. The third is going to be a small LLC of 5 partners, so....

GApps FTW.
 
SamuraiBigEd said:
Upgrading all the computers to Windows 7 at my business partners other business, a travel agency, and had a major mishap. Archived Outlook and copied the archive.pst and outlook.pst on one system and on two accounts on another, copied them all to respective folders on a USB drive.

Here comes the fun part, the first one only copied the archive, the second the secondary account copied both and the main and most important copied neither!:hmmmm:

Now for the clincher, both systems have been wiped and loaded, did not find out till afterwards when I went to restore all the accounts! :eek:

I should have verified but it showed them copying to the drive and when I dragged and dropped to the correct folders on the drive appears to be when the problems started.

This amounts to 7 months of contracts and correspondence on group trips, time to do this...:vroam:
Click to expand...

I Know it would be a pain but could you not use a recovery software on the main computer to retrieve the lost information. It may not be to late to get it back. However the longer the wait and the more use on said computer will make it harder to get.
 
argedion said:
I Know it would be a pain but could you not use a recovery software on the main computer to retrieve the lost information. It may not be to late to get it back. However the longer the wait and the more use on said computer will make it harder to get.
Click to expand...

I did a full format, not likely to find anything of use. I've tried recovery software before and they don't seem to be good at recovering after a format and are only marginal at recovering data from corrupt drives or memory cards.
 
True, full format versus quick format makes a huge difference in recoverability.

So, now you know - backup backup backup and make a checklist every time you work on someone's computer- and include file location verification both pre and post backup / copy / move operations (IOW, check where the files are before you start playing with them, and check where the files are after you're done playing with them).

If you don't make the checklist, you're likely apt to forget again. After having done computer repair for well over 20 years, trust me on this one.

As an aside - I mentioned move up there, but when playing with clients' systems, I never use a move function for this very reason - copy and paste - yes, it's a bit more tedious, but hey, I can verify / compare files in two different directories to make sure the entire file made tit to its destination too....
 
even after a full partition and format I have found testdisk to be very effective in "Partition Recovery" I have gotten back to the state before I majorly screwed up. However the more you write to the drive the less the chance of a full recovery. I've also have used testdisk to fix a failing harddrive to allow me to get everthing off of it and on to an external. get a ghost (Clonzilla or Norton Ghost) save the image for the just incase for the future. that has saved my butt a few times as well.
 
johnlgalt said:
True, full format versus quick format makes a huge difference in recoverability.

So, now you know - backup backup backup and make a checklist every time you work on someone's computer- and include file location verification both pre and post backup / copy / move operations (IOW, check where the files are before you start playing with them, and check where the files are after you're done playing with them).

If you don't make the checklist, you're likely apt to forget again. After having done computer repair for well over 20 years, trust me on this one.

As an aside - I mentioned move up there, but when playing with clients' systems, I never use a move function for this very reason - copy and paste - yes, it's a bit more tedious, but hey, I can verify / compare files in two different directories to make sure the entire file made tit to its destination too....
Click to expand...

Yeah, that was my mistake, I got lazy and did move instead of copy and paste, I should know better than that.
 
argedion said:
even after a full partition and format I have found testdisk to be very effective in "Partition Recovery" I have gotten back to the state before I majorly screwed up. However the more you write to the drive the less the chance of a full recovery. I've also have used testdisk to fix a failing harddrive to allow me to get everthing off of it and on to an external. get a ghost (Clonzilla or Norton Ghost) save the image for the just incase for the future. that has saved my butt a few times as well.
Click to expand...

I'll give it a try, thanks!
 
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