Whew! That was a close one

[Steve A.]

My computer was slowing down and I noticed that I did not have much space on Drive C: so as I have done before I used PartitionMagic 8.0 to borrow some space from the adjacent partition (F: ) which had a lot of room.

So I told the program what I wanted done- there were 3 steps it had to do- and it had to reboot in order to do it's work before Windows loaded. Everything was going fine but then I got a message: too many disc errors on Drive C: to complete the operation.

After it rebooted again I noticed that F: was missing. PM 8.0 did not give me an option to undo the previous operations, although it did show the partition but with no drive letter. I spent some time trying to get that partition back with no luck so I figured that I could probably live without what I lost: it was less than 3GB- big deal.

Only when I tried to access my SCHEM folder in ACDSee to get information to answer someone's email, SCHEM had dropped off the ACDC Favorites list. And then it hit me- my entire library of schems saved and created over the past 10+ years was on the now-invisible Drive F:
Holy shit, Batman, we are in deep doo-doo!

PM 8.0 had a file view which showed all of the files on Drive F: but offered no way to bring them back. I searched help but nothing turned up telling me how to get that partition back.

What the heck- why don't I try another program (preferably something that is free)? EASUS Partition Master Home Edition seemed to be highly recommended so I downloaded it and gave it a shot.

Wow! It could do all sorts of things that the Partition Magic could not do- and had a better interface.

To be safe I did not want to do any processing to the hidden partition of Drive F: so I copied it to some unallocated space I had to clear for it on one of my hard drives. And then backed that up to a DVD data disc (with a second copy to be safe).

Now that I have gotten those files back I need to clean things up (my drive letters are all screwed up from my experiments- I don't know if EASUS has the drive remapper that PM 8.0 has).

Moral of the story: when a programs suggests that you back up your data before initiating an operation, it is a good idea to follow its advice.

Steve Ahola

[defaced]

I have actually waxed 2-3 drives using PM 8.0 trying to do exactly that, which has pushed me to my current arrangement: no storage of personal files on the C: drive. I've got a small (~30gig) WD Raptor which is for my OS and programs, and two 1Tb drives in hardware RAID 1 for storage. I will have to keep that other partition software handy though. It's nice to know what's good so if you're in a pinch, you have a way out.

I don't know if EASUS has the drive remapper that PM 8.0 has

You didn't mention what OS you're working with, but in XP you can do this through the Control Panel-Administrative Tools-Computer Management-Storage-Disk Management-Right Click-Change Drive Letter and Paths. The only thing is you can't move the system drive. I found out that the hard way when I ended up with a G: system drive. No good.

[Jag]

A hard drive can fail at any time for any number of reasons. I think the most important thing to do on any computer is regular backup, at least once per week. With the cost of hard drives these days, install a 1TB for backup only. If your data is really important, get a 1TB external and backup to that.

[Steve A.]

A hard drive can fail at any time for any number of reasons. I think the most important thing to do on any computer is regular backup, at least once per week. With the cost of hard drives these days, install a 1TB for backup only. If your data is really important, get a 1TB external and backup to that.

I have over 10TB data on my external drives and I haven't found a good way to back all of that up. I usually keep duplicate files on different drives of everything that is important (one reason why my data files have grown to 10TB) but for some reason I never did back up my SCHEMS folder. (Actually I did have most of those files backed up- every few years I will copy that hard drive to a new, larger drive and I would leave the old drive intact as a backup.) But over the years I start forgetting which loose drive came from where.

I have known that my boot drive has been going south and I have backed up all of my data from Drive C: but I have not been as diligent with Drive F: which is on the same physical disc. My bad!

I try to keep all of my data files on an external drive but a lot of my files end up in My Documents (which is on C: ) I did learn in Vista how to redirect many of those folders to a different drive but I haven't tried it in XP yet. (I have a new Windows 7 machine that I will be migrating to, but I'm not quite ready to do that yet.)

Thanks for all of the suggestions!

Steve Ahola

P.S. I had thought that a RAID array might be a solution but after a friend's RAID hard drive died I learned that it does not offer the protection that I thought it would. Her array was RAID 0 (striped discs for speed) but I talked to the disk recovery tech about backup options. RAID 1 sounds great- everything on one drive is mirrored to a second drive. But he pointed out that a lot of the drive failures are caused by the operating system screwing up, so if it screws up one drive it will screw up the other as well. RAID 1 is solid protection against a physical hard drive failure.

What he recommended in addition to a RAID 1 array was automatic backup software that would back up all of your new data files on a daily basis, and the entire drive(s) on a weekly basis.

Much of my files are downloads which I could usually replace later if I lost them. It is the data files that I create myself that need to backed up religiously.

P.P.S. I did have an external drive fail a few months ago- I neglected to clean the dust from the vents on the enclosure so it evidently overheated.

So it was definitely a bummer when I lost that drive. But the good news was that I did lose about 100GB of Bob Dylan albums and live shows that were not backed up.

[defaced]

I try to keep all of my data files on an external drive but a lot of my files end up in My Documents (which is on C: ) I did learn in Vista how to redirect many of those folders to a different drive but I haven't tried it in XP yet.

It works on XP: right click, properties, move. I started doing that about 6 months ago.

[Steve A.]

It works on XP: right click, properties, move. I started doing that about 6 months ago.

Hey- thanks a lot! I just tried that and it worked great.

Steve

P.S. A great free utility for doing manual backups of folders, etc. is Allway Sync:

http://allwaysync.com/

On the left you set one folder and on the right you set another folder. You can do a one way sync in either direction or in both directions. I works great for a finite number of files although if you include too many files it can get bogged down and sometimes not be able to complete the operation (something like 100,000 files taking up 10GB of hard drive space). At some point there are other utilities more appropriate for what you are doing.

It is great for copying files from one folder to another. Unlike the Windows default, if it encounters an error it will skip that file and then move on to the rest of the list. You can then run it again to see if can copy those files that it missed on the first run (if so then try to copy them over manually or back them up somewhere).

One obvious application would be to use it with a flash drive to keep it synchonized with a folder on your computer. I haven't tried the bi-directional sync but I would do two one way syncs to copy new files on the flash drive to the computer and vice versa.

I would give it a big 3 thumbs up! (Well, I *am* all thumbs...)

[Steve Conner]

There's also FreeFileSync and Microsoft's own SyncToy.