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How I Deleted My Whole MP3 Collection But Was Able to Recover Most of It

So I’m pretty good about securing my data and backing up. I have a RAID 1 setup on my main machine as well as an external NAS that is also setup as a RAID 1. The only thing I haven’t done yet but will soon is find an offsite backup solution in the cloud. I’ve been doing manual snapshot backups to my NAS from my local machine but I wanted a cleaner more automated solution that not only backed up a directory but also synced it.

So what do I mean by syncing? Well there are programs that will keep a mirror image of a source directory to a specified destination directory. The reason I want this is because after a backup I will often move directories around and delete them. When you setup a backup scenario these changes aren’t reflected, but if you setup a sync, they are. In the past I had used a program called Second Copy that did this well but I have recently discovered two new free apps that also provided sync functionality and wanted to give them a shot as it’s always nice to have a free solution to recommend to people. More on that in a minute, but first let me share my hell with you.

So I setup the first of these new backup apps which was called GFI Backup. I decided to use my MP3 collection as the source directory for these tests (huge mistake). It appeared to be a pretty nice program with a clean and simple interface. The backup process worked great, but the setup options related to synchronizing folders was a little confusing and I couldn’t get them to work properly. So I went on to the second app called Syncback which I read about in Lifehacker backup tools roundup. I decided to create a new source directory for this test with just a subset of my mp3 files in it. I did however place the destination directory in the same root directory as the one I setup for GFI Backup. I also could not get Syncback to properly synchronize the directory. So I gave up and went to bed that evening.

The next day I went to my machine and as I often do loaded Winamp and click the play all button for my collection. I noticed that it was skipping around from track to track in the player and suddenly felt my heart sink. I knew that behavior. It meant that the data from the loaded library wasn’t located in the directory. I quickly went to my MP3 folder. I saw all my folders in there but as I poked around within directories I found them all to be empty. I then went to the destination directory on my NAS. Same thing, no files. I went into panic mode. I double and triple checked the directories but no luck. At this point I realized that something in my synchronization setup of the backup apps had gone seriously wrong. I’ll say that I never went back to try and determine what exactly I did wrong, but if it was that easy to screw things up, I wanted nothing to do with either. To be fair, they both operated fine as backup programs, but synchronization can be a little trickier and neither made that setup work easily. Also, the fact that I shared a destination directory for my testing may have lead to the problems as well. So take my mistakes with a grain of salt and if you choose to try these programs do it with some unimportant data files first so that you don’t have to worry about losing anything important. I know better than taking the actions I did for these test. I can sometimes be a bonehead.

Anyways, at this point it was time to seek out a recovery program to attempt to undelete as much of my MP3 collection as I could possibly salvage. One thing to note is that whenever you delete data on a hard disk your best bet is to stop doing any file related actions on the machine and stop using it if possible. This will ensure the chances of recovering the data. When you delete files all the data is still on the system and the operating system just sets a flag to not show them in your file system. If you start moving files around and writing new data to your system then you risk overwriting the data that is on there and thus lowering your chances of recovery. So I had used a few recovery apps in the past and needed to refresh my memory as to which were good.

I found this great Lifehacker story on the five best free data recovery tools. I had used a few of these before and just wanted to determine which would be the best for the job. Of the five listed I decided to try the two which offered the most functionality which were Recuva and Undelete Plus. I’ll cut to the chase and tell you that Recuva was far better. It scanned the drive very quickly (less than a minute) to determine which deleted files where on my system. The same operation took about 20 minutes on Undelete plus. Also, recovering files using Recuva was very fast it appeared to be able to do a several within a second or so whereas Undelete Plus took several seconds just to recover a single file. Now this may not seem like a big deal but I had to recover over 15,000 files. Lastly, the ability to filter the results by a specific directory worked great in Recuva and I couldn’t find an easy way to do it in Undelete Plus. Needless to say I chose to use Recuva.

(Click image for full view with details)

Recuva also had a nice feature that showed the probability of being able to recover each file that it scanned as being deleted. In my case it appeared that over 95% of the files had an excellent chance of recovery. So before I started I got an external USB hard drive I had which also had a snapshot of my MP3 collection on it from 2 years ago so at least I had something but have obviously acquired quite a bit since then. I created a new directory on the drive, flagged all files in my MP3 directory and told Recuva to go to work. After ~2 hours I was able to recover over 15k files for a total of over 60Gb of data. That turned out to be over 95% of my lost files. I was pretty amazed by how lucky I was.

I had to take screenshots (because there is no facility to save the file info) of the remaining files Recuva identified as being poor or having no chance of recovery so I had a record of them. This way I had a record of what I lost. I did locate some of the files that they listed as having a poor chance of recovery and they worked so it could be a painstaking process to try and determine which are good and which need to be replaced but at least I have a record of them. Overall I’m extremely happy with Recuva and sending this awesome freeware a donation for what they’ve done for me.

The other issue is that there was some data that was still ok and on my local drive that didn’t get deleted. I knew this because showing properties on my local MP3 directory showed that there was 5Gb of data still on it. but there was no way I was going to click individually on the hundreds of folders many of them nested to determine where the data was. Ok, if push came to shove I would have done that but I was pretty sure there was a tool to do this for me. I remembered that there are some file / directory compare tools out there and was able to find WinMerge which was recommended on Lifehacker as well (Yes, I like Lifehacker). So I compared the original MP3 directory to the recovered one and WinMerge showed me that there were 7 directories on the original that weren’t on the recovered one. Nice, so now I was able to identify these folders with data in them that wasn’t deleted and could now merge them into the newly recovered MP3 directory.

But there were still more files to be found as that wasn’t everything. Apparently some of the folders in the source still had files in them. So the issue was that I would still have to click on every folder in WinMerge to try and find which ones had data on the original directory versus the newly recovered one. That was going to be a pain so I looked into a way to do a directory listing of the source to try and root them out. I found this great tip on how to create a text file of a directory using the command prompt. This worked perfectly. I opened the file in a text editor and then began searching the file for the value “.mp3″ which then uncovered the only folders that had files in them. Bingo, that worked and now I finally was able to locate every possible file I could recover.

The last thing I want to mention is that I could have taken another course of action that would have probably insured a closer to 100% recovery. If you remember I had all the data on my NAS which also was subsequently deleted. I read about a process where if I would have taken one of the drives in my RAID 1 array out and placed it in an external case and then plugged it into my computer via USB and used a program called Diskinternals Uneraser which would mount the NAS ext2 file system and then undelete the files that way. But I figured I had done a pretty good job with my recovery process and really didn’t want to go through all the trouble and then risk any issues by putting that drive back in the NAS and losing any data on their after the process. Enough damage and time had been wasted already.

So as you can see this was a very agonizing process that I brought upon myself by not really being careful testing new software that can be very dangerous on unimportant data. I was very lucky to find such good tools to help with the recovery and hopefully this will be useful to someone else who unfortunately runs into a large data loss situation. So I’m going back to using Second Copy for backups and Synchronization which has worked perfectly in the past. I just hope I learned my lesson and can avoid this torture from happening again.

Great Experience with my D-Link 323 2 Bay NAS Enclosure

At the beginning of this year I decided that I wanted to make a change to how I handled my personal storage. I had a custom built PC that has 2 x 500Gb hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration as well as a 750Gb additional drive to store photos, videos, and other large data files. I also shared this data to other computers on my home network. I decided that I wanted to make a change to my configuration and accomplish a few things.

I was becoming afraid of not having redundancy with my 750Gb drive so I decided that I wanted to upgrade to another RAID 1 configuration for this data. But I didn’t want this to be done inside my main computer, I wanted to go external. Lastly I wanted the data to be shared across this external drive to my network and not dependant on my personal machine being on.

The solution was to find an external 2 bay NAS. Once I made that decision I began my research. Buying a NAS is somewhat of a tricky affair as there isn’t as many resources available as with other major electronic products. Also, there are many companies with offerings that I had never heard of. After spending tons of time Googling my way across many websites and resources I finally landed at the NAS section of SmallNetBuilder.com which offered the best information.

What made the site so great was that they offered a custom filtered charts area where I could plug in the requirements of what I was looking for and view products returned that they had reviewed and rated. One of the most important factors for me was the network speed of the device. Other things I was looking for was BYOD (provide my own hard drives) RAID, Gigabit LAN, FTP, UpNP and a reasonable price.

After narrowing down the field based on my requirements the D-Link 323 appeared to be a lead contender based on having gotten good reviews and being the lowest priced solution by far. The review on SmallNetBuilder was great but I wanted to hear the voice of the people. So I made my way to the Amazon and Newegg pages and also found that the users who had purchased this unit were happy. I was sold and ordered mine from Amazon. But before I did, I had to decide which drives to put in the unit. At the time I made my purchase in April, the best bang for buck was for 1 TB drives. I did more research and found overwhelmingly good recommendations from several people for the Western Digital 1 TB Caviar Green SATA drives which is what I bought.

When I got all the hardware I arranged it nicely for the unboxing shot you see below and then immediately dropped the drives into the enclosure. It was easier than snapping together two Lego blocks. I then powered it on and followed the directions to setup my 2 x 1TB drives in a RAID 1 configuration. The setup is done through a great simple interface using your browser that is very similar to managing a router. That went smooth and then it was time to backup the 750Gb drive in my machine to this new NAS. Sure enough the speed ratings were true and I was happy with how quickly the process went considering it was happening over LAN and not USB or external SATA.

After I copied the data over I was able to remove the 750GB drive from my local machine which I was happy to do which provided less power, noise and heat now from my main machine. Speaking of which there is a nice setting for the NAS which allows the 2 drives to go into hibernation mode which you can configure from the menu. So I continue to navigate and learn all of the features and menu system. Some of the other features offered by the D-Link 323 that I didn’t mention before are that it also can be an iTunes server, DHCP server, Bittorrent server, and offers Dynamic DNS support. You can also control access to the device by users and groups along with defining quotas. It’s a very feature rich device. And if you still are yearning for more there is a hack you can do to get even deeper root access with even more features with mods from here.

I really like the interface to control the device. It’s very clean and simple and offers tons of features. One of the only issues I had with the unit was with the iTunes server. I didn’t plan on using it, but ended up enabling it to see how it worked. I ended up not needing it but after having enabled it I noticed that my drives didn’t seem to want to hibernate anymore. The only way to fix this was to disable to the iTunes server. Not a biggie for me, but maybe for you. Also, I’m not sure if that was just my setup or a bug in the firmware but worth investigating if that’s important to you. I was able to successfully get the UpNP running and recognized by my PS3 and in turn was able to stream all media from the D-Link 323 to it.

So in conclusion I am very happy with the D-Link 323. It was great to be able to purchase such a feature rich and high performance NAS that came highly recommended even though it was the least expensive one available. If you are looking for an external enclosure that you can tuck away in the closet next to your router, get redundancy so you don’t worry about losing data, and getting great speed over your lan, than this is the NAS for you.

Pushing a Geek Agenda with Trending Topics

I’ve seen my share of bitching and moaning about how lame the trending topics on Twitter have become. Well with the mainstream comes the TMZ crowd so unfortunately it’s a sign of the times. Remember when geeks ran Twitter? Remember Color Wars? Hopefully in the future we’ll be able to have trending topics created based on our social graph. But until that day comes, I had a goofy idea thinking it might be fun to have a weekly organized way to promote geekdom across the trendingsphere. That idea came in the way of trying to create a geek meme on a weekly basis.

see more Funny Graphs

My idea would be to throw up a site where people could come up with ideas for a topic that is voted on a weekly basis and then executed on a given day. Perhaps it could be known as #trendingtuesday.  The website would also provide an archive of #trendingtuesday’s past. I could probably throw up the site fairly easily using a CMS platform like Pligg or cobble one together with Drupal to get things started. It would also be cool to have a real-time feed of the topic on the site during the day it runs. Perhaps this is just my brain acting up since I may be over caffeinated but I thought it might be fun to do.

I’ll start it off today with the idea that got me thinking about this in the first place. I thought it would be fun to reveal things that we may be embarrassed to admit in the form of #geekconfessions. (Note: Guess I’m not the innovator here. I just searched Twitter and it appears that @direflail came up with this idea as well).  So I plan on shooting out a few tweets today using the hashtag and see where it goes.

So if this doesn’t take off, how about using a similar plan to create a trending topic calling out the actions of #douchebags? Now that sounds like a very necessary public service.

Kids Revisit Harry Potter Jelly Belly Tasting 5 Years Later

Five years ago I came across a box of Harry Potter Jelly Bellies. I was taken back by these as they didn’t contain your standard bellies. In fact they included some very unsavory sounding flavors including booger, earthworm, dirt, grass, ear wax, soap and vomit. The first thing that came to mind was whether I could get my kids to eat them.

So I took these home and decided to film my kids eating them. In retrospect with the possibility of social services knocking on my door, this may not have been the best idea. But after all was said and done, the laughing, the crying, I decided to finally post the video for all to see.

The kids and I watched this for the first time in years today and we really got a kick out of it. Then the lightbulb went off in my head wondering whether they still made these gems. So we went on the hunt and found a new version of them called Bean Boozled. I guess the Harry Potter license ran out. Nonetheless these are similar but with a new twist. They put in two identical colored bellies, one tastes good, the other blah! There were some newly added flavors including skunk spray, rotten egg, baby wipes, pencil shavings, toothpaste, and moldy cheese. So I turned on the camera 5 years later to capture the kids tasting these again and not surprisingly had very similar results.

Disclaimer: Kids, please dont try this at home :)

Alex & Jaclyn Eat Harry Potter Jelly Bellies for the First Time

Alex & Jaclyn Eat Harry Potter Jelly Bellies Five Years Later

Bonus: I came across this rather amusing tasting review of the beans which I thought I’d share if you’re curiousity is still captured by these.

My Pool Party Post Mortem

I decided to have a little get together a few weeks ago. I invited an eclectic group made up of friends that included a cross-polynation of Techies, FriendFeeders, Tweeters, IRL friends, and X PRIZErs along with their kids.

I knew that many people I invited lived pretty far away and along with that I live in Chatsworth which is known to be one of the hottest places in the San Fernando Valley. So I felt I needed to do something to entice people. I remembered an episode of Entourage (Season 3 Episode 2) that really had fun with the valley heat and decided to chop it up and use it as part of a promo video. The result is what you see below:

I hired a taco cart and beer was flowing from the keg and My wife Esther was pouring her sweet margaritas. Esther also surprised me with an assortment of awesome geek cupcakes varied enough to please everyone. KW was also kind enough to bring some Korean BBQ ribs which the taco guy gladly grilled for us.

I was looking for a cool way to crowdsource the music. So thanks to the tip by Mike Fabio I setup iTunes DJ so that any quest with an iPhone or Touch could tap into my library and vote on which songs to play. This turned out to be a really cool way to allow guests to choose music and I recommend others to offer this at their party.

I had a great time and really enjoyed everyone that came by. I won’t go into details because I think the great photos that people took speak for themselves. I look forward to doing this again.

Photos by Adrian Caluci

Photos by Polly

Photos by Michael Timmons