I’ve done some pretty damned stupid things in my time, but today I excelled myself. While I was testing a set of about a dozen old IDE & SATA disc drives, I only went & quick-formatted the USB drive containing all my photos and other significant data, by mistake. I have a backup, which isn’t quite up to date, so it won’t be a total loss, which is something I suppose. I’m currently running data recovery software though, so should get it all back. Fingers crossed.
Update: The data recovery software has finished it’s scanning phase and is now executing the recovery. After almost 10 hours, it’s reached 6.1% completion, so this is clearly an exercise in patience. It’ll get there eventually, but the downside is that it’ll recover a lot of files that I’d deleted on purpose, over a long period. Unraveling all those junk files is going to take time, too.
October 24, 2025
