Recovery

So I was trying to organize my thousands of images, and instead of 1 subfolder being deleted, the entire Pictures directory went.  For some reason I didn't keel over in a dead faint.  It was too big to go into the recycle bin so it was gone gone gone.  I called my pal who is a genius in all things computer and he told me to get a program called Recuva.

I did and it brought 99% of the things back.  Nothing actually goes anywhere, it's there until it's written over, but you need to take quick action and don't do anything else.  All these images are now on my spare drive.

That was Friday.  Yesterday I'm looking at these images and I say "I know what's missing.  Every single Photoshop file."  Recuva doesn't look for a psd extension, it looks for jpg or png or gif unless you tell it differently.  When I told it to look for the psd, it said "Buzz off."

I downloaded (remember, every time you write to the hard drive you're overwriting something) a program called Pandora Recovery and it brought me back about 90% of the Photoshop files.  I recommend these programs to you, they're free, small and they work.  Get them before you have a crisis.

You can, of course, upload your hard drive to a cloud service like Carbonite, Mozy, CrashPlan or whatever.  It really will take about 3 months to send the files.  I started to do that and stopped the procedure.  Instead I bought a Western Digital 500 GB enclosed portable harddrive for a laptop from Fry's.  Yes, it works for a desktop, too.  500 GB is 500 GB, it's a USB connector and smaller than an enclosure for a 3.5 drive.  My choice.  YMMV. 

I do send my work at the end of each session to a website so it's stored off-site.  You can easily use gmail for that.  Amazon also has a free Cloud service if you don't have a great amount to store, you'll pay $20 for a year with lots of space.  You want something you can access if your house burns down and you don't yank the computer out of the wall to bring it with you which is what I did when I had an electrical fire years ago.  You should have--regardless of the computer talk--a go bag in case of emergencies.  Keep a flash drive in there with stuff you don't want to lose.  You should also have cash, a credit card, spare glasses, contacts, your meds, some clothes, a bottle of water and something to eat that won't spoil.  You don't know what kind of crisis may make you leave your residence in 30 minutes or less.  Be at least somewhat prepared.

The Domino Project is a new way to think about publishing. Founded by Seth Godin and powered by Amazon, we're trying to change the way books are built, sold and spread.   Here's a thought from "futurist" Seth Godin-- Paying For First

"Here’s a bit of speculation:
Soon, there will be three kinds of books on the Kindle.
$1.99 ebooks. This is the clearing price for virtually all ebooks going forward.
$5 ebooks. This is the price for bestsellers, hot titles and books you have no choice but to buy because they were assigned in school.
$10 ebooks. This is the price you will pay to get the book first, to get it fast, to get it before everyone else. There might even be a subset of books for $20 in this category."

I don't know how many people will jump to buy a $20 ebook but the other points seem very reasonable.

I listened to the new Evanescence album which Spin was streaming for a while.  I'm not as excited by it as I am with her last but I know Amy Lee Hartzler is a super accomplished musician/songwriter, intelligent and also quite beautiful.  This is the song I liked the best.