[CR] Wooljersey

Sorry for all the email about this. If you don't know what I'm talking about; http://www.wooljersey.com/gallery suffered a disk failure. It's a site I ran where people - many on this list - could post pictures of bicycles. I didn't have a disk backup and sent the disk for data recovery to a reputable vendor. I mentioned the cost and amazingly the members of this list contributed more than enough to cover the cost. Thank you! I'll gift some of the balance to two worthy CR members and keep the rest for the monthly hosting fee. Right now it's $125 / month but I hope to move it to somewhere cheaper.

I requested a PDF of the invoice. I felt funny about asking for money with just my word that I needed it. Here's what I just paid a few moments ago:

http://209.190.31.210/apache2-default/302332.pdf

I also got this description of the work from Kelly Chessen at drivesavers.com:

Thank you for choosing DriveSavers for your data recovery needs. As we discussed on the phone, we're pleased to report the recovery was successful.

The drive had suffered from a failure of the actuator (read/write head assembly). The failure of this component led to physical damage on the platters and software corruption.

The recovery process began in our class 100 clean room, where we worked to overcome the damage and extract an "image" of the drive. This is a sector-by-sector copy of entire drive capacity. Due to the media damage, this imaging process was laborious. Once the image was as complete as possible, it then went to one of our software recovery engineers who are specialists in resolving corruption, repairing files and file structure and extracting useable data. The image file contained corrupted information as a result of the actuator writing data incorrectly. Once the data had been verified and repaired to the greatest extent possible, it was scanned for viruses and loaded to the final target media. Given the damaged state of the drive, we were very pleased to accomplish a recovery that appears to be about 95% complete. The cause of the drive failure cannot be determined with certainty, but a power fluctuation (black-out, brown-out or surge) would be the most likely cause.

I should receive the new, portable disk containing the restored data tomorrow. I'll start backing it up immediately. I'm gone camping this weekend but I'll get to work on the wooljersey restoration ASAP when I get back. It will not be a quick restoration. Some of the data is still a bit scrambled (see above) so it might take me a week or two to get that sorted. Once it's up on the current server I'll look to move it to a more cost-effective hosting service.

Thank you all very much! If anyone wants to put something in the wooljersey tip cup for future hosting, you can paypal me at this address and NOW I'LL STOP PANDERING FOR MONEY AND SYMPATHY AND GET BACK TO WORK.

Morgan "I get by with a little help from my friends." Fletcher Oakland, CA USA