In the YGTBSM category…

Posted on by January 27, 2015

For the win-

11 years worth of work related data…

And it stopped being read by the laptop that it was connected with…

A couple of hours on the phone with ‘tech support’ including escalation to Tier 2, and still no resolution, other than screwing up my drive configurations to the network and printers.

ext hard drive

Monday, the IT weenies decided they needed to take both the computer and external hard drive to figure out why it wasn’t seeing the drive.

They re-imaged the laptop, and still couldn’t get the drive to work. But it apparently ‘connected’ to one of the test machines, but didn’t allow any files to be pulled (encryption and all that).  In their “infinite” wisdom they decided to reformat the drive!!!

So I now have a working laptop, with no data on it, I finally got my network mappings back on Wednesday, and now an external hard drive that STILL doesn’t work correctly, but has had 11 years worth of backup data erased…

 

And my co-worker was just asked yesterday for some data from 2000!

Sigh… Is it December yet???

Comments

In the YGTBSM category… — 23 Comments

  3. Technology. It’s so great. Can’t live with it or without it. Makes work short and simple…NO CAN DO! or SO SORRY! Words to use until you get your information. Meanwhile, work might be more productive if you go to the range?

  5. I can always count on two failsafe backup disks. NSA and COMCHI.

    I just cannot count and their allowing me to download at my convenience.

  6. When I work for the Big Company and went overseas the IT folks had to configure my Crackberry so it would work in Lower East Jesus.

    They did a great job. I would get all the company BS emails but I could not call or send emails on my phone. I then received lot’s of angry emails on why I was not responding to calls and messages on my company Crackberry.

    It made a fun trip even more funner!

  7. B/BP/Rev- Yep… sigh… Only allowed 1 B/U

    Fargo- I just laugh at em… 😀

    CP- No, but I think our IT people did…

    ERJ- Good point!

    Gerry- Oh yeah, BTDT! And when they called my personal phone, I told ’em fix the problem and turned by personal cell OFF!

  8. I realized that I had ceased being a platoon leader and was indeed the company commander when I got an angry phone call from the BN S-1 about not answering emails. My response of “I was in the field” did not fly; since, apparently that is what smart phones are for.

  9. How about shipping it off to a data recovery service? If the drive hasn’t been written to, the data is still there. If it has been written to, stop using it now if your going this route. Each time you use it, it will overwrite some of your existing data. This is often no big deal for many documents and such but may be a problem with some exe and bin files. You’d need to talk to the vendor.

    I’m not sure where encryption will fit here but it shouldn’t make much difference as the 1’s and 0’s will still be the same.

    As for security clearance levels of the data, I googled “high security clearance hard drive recovery” and got a several DoD grade clearance vendors and others which promise of high security of which I don’t know as I didn’t go too far into investigating. Here is on of many examples

    http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/recovery-services/service-plans/

    Formating only deletes the address’s of the data, not the data itself.

    I had a drive recovered that had wigged out electronically, in the early 2003 or 2004 and it was about $200 plus $130 for a new HD. Steep but I needed the records and some of the programs. The moved everything over to the new drive. Got everything back about 4-5 days FedEx.

    I’m sure you’d need to sell this idea to the muckity-mucks upstairs and IT. Not sure why IT didn’t reco this instead of formatting the damn thing.

    good luck

  10. There is software to perform an unformat. It’s very likely that the data is fully recoverable as long as you don’t start using the drive. Also, there are companies that specialize in data recovery and could retrieve your data. Pricy, but depending on the value of data, perhaps cheap.

    Incidentally, if it was the only copy in existence, it wasn’t back-up data, it was the primary data. Back-ups are multiple copies of primary data that allow you to survive a format, a drive failure, a robbery, or any other source of data loss.

  11. SPE- Yep…LOL I got ‘paged’ one time on Skypage to call ‘immediately’, but I was in the air. They had airphones, so I used my .gov credit card… THAT one didn’t fly well with PSD… 😀

    Plira- It’s unclass, and working on it…

    ASM- Oh yeah, I know… I’m trying to get them to DO the recovery by using the exact thing about this being the ONLY dataset… sigh

  12. There are various “Live CD” recovery tools out there that you boot the laptop from, and it will at least allow you access the data on the drive.

    As others have said, as long as it hasn’t been written to, there’s a good chance you can recover most of it.

  13. drjim- not so much… When they re-imaged it they blew away the encryption key… Gotta go the pro route, or throw it in the trashcan… dammit!

  16. NMCI could screw up a wet dream, break a crowbar in a sandbox, and lose an anvil in a parking lot. How do I know? Along with the work I do, my wife used to work for one of their HellDesks. She got out of there quickly.
    Due to the encryption and loss of the key, recovery is probably impossible. I truly feel for your loss.

  17. I do image backups to two external drives and one of them is always unplugged from the computer and the power source. Theft could still get me but that’s about it.

  18. They reformated your drive… I think they worked for my agency about a decade ago.

    I was backing up to an external drive. Then I dropped that drive. It doesn’t work so good if the plastic cover splits partly open.

  21. I work in field service / IT. It chaps my hide when my coworkers burn folks like that. I don’t know if it’s growing up in front of a pc that causes it, or if arrogance just breeds in IT. There are more ways to do things that “my way”. Could be that growing up on a farm and having to fix something with what was at hand. That’s the best school I ever went to.

    I think I’d pull a ski mask from inventory and meet them after hours for a little wall-to-wall counselling!!