Recovery.

After posting yesterday’s Blip, I went through my memory cards and sticks: labelling and formatting as appropriate. Eventually, the bleedin’ obvious happened and formatted my hard disk. In such circumstances, it is important not to panic, so I Googled "recovery software" and downloaded it while wondering who on earth made the executive decision at Microsoft to remove the old DOS Undelete utility from the Windows operating system. I remember demonstrating the function to an unbelieving colleague by doing a full format of a 1.4Mb floppy disk (which took a few minutes) followed by unformatting and showing him that the data was intact. Yesterday’s format was on a 1Tb disk, three-quarters full, and it took less than a second.
 
The free downloaded software took six hours to analyse the disk and then asked me to cough up 100 notes before it would restore the files. On yer bike – as the saying goes. I found another programme which really was free but decided that it would be worth £20 for the full version, it took six hours trying (and failing) to create a disk image, another six to to do the analysis, then I took half an hour to work out how to tell it to just recover files since the last back-up and then there was another half hour devoted to the actual deed. Of course, it also recovered files that had been deliberately deleted along with fragments and temporary files. It will probably take me a day to sort out the mess as the directory structure has been lost. There are some files missing, how many, I will probably never know but, there is no trace of the Word document with the Blip journal for this month – obviously no great loss. The initial problem was that Windows 10 doesn't assign drive letters to the disks, so that they don't appear in a logical order in the file manager.
 
We took Jnr out to the local Italian Joint this evening after he had exhausted himself over Galapagos finches - he's going back to University soon. The I-J is a nice place with good food and friendly staff; as Jnr pointed out, we shouldn’t be surprised, it is their job after all. Since that is often not the case, they received a (moderately) generous tip.