Sloe Times

So back in the before time (well before I started blogging), I was fairly serious into collecting, mixing, and creating music. Primarily dance/club like stuff. My medium of choice was mp3. Primarily because it's hard to deal with a thousand or so CDs and I don't have the space for turn tables and a vinyl collection. I do have gigabytes and gigabytes of disk space so everything got ripped to mp3. This worked out well for a couple of years and then the first fatal HD crash occurred. Ok, this sucked huge. Fortunately I had actually backed up the majority of the stuff that was not easily replaceable and everything else was still on CD in a storage box. A few months later I've finally got things recovered (you'd be amazed how long it takes to re-rip everything) and have acquired 100 GB or so of new material and having a grand ol' time. Then the second fatal HD failure occurs. Now, we'll ignore the fact that as an IT person, I should know better and I'll plead lack of facilities. Even backing up to DVD is painful and I don't have a DLT or similar tape system that could handle the volume of data. Needless to say, that without proper backups and untold amounts of time and effort lost on my collection I stepped back away from my music.

Anyway, fast forward to last week. I'm cleaning up my office and come across the three failed HDs with all my data (old programs that I've written, music, digital photos, etc) that I've stored while I try to decide if I'm going to shell out the cash to have them professionally recovered. If you haven't looked into this personally, let me just say that it is not something that can be approached trivially. Just to recover 80GB of data, the cheapest quote I had was $500. I had 240 GB of data on those drives. Regardless, I kept the drives around while I tried to figure out just how much I missed the data so that I could make the decision to fork over the money to get it recovered or not. Oddly enough, the things I missed the most was my library of PERL code. I've written all kinds of things over the years and every once in awhile a project comes along where I think I've done something similar in the past and instead of being able to re-use my code I generally have to rebuild it from scratch.

So, I started browsing the web again last week and getting quotes for data recovery to see if the prices have come down any in the last 6 months since there are quite a few more vendors in the market. While I'm doing this searching I come across a site for do-it-yourself data recovery. The reason I found this is because they specifically mentioned the type of drives I have (Maxtor) and in some cases my specific models. Using their tips, and a Knoppix boot CD, I've been slowly recovering the majority of my data off of the disks. There are some corrupted files here and there, but it's gone from total loss to simply annoying and I've started playing with my music again now that I've gotten some of it back. I've been grooving for almost 5 hours now and wondering how it is I could have just walked away from it for so long.

The only really frustrating thing I've come across this evening is that one of the pieces of software I used in the past, Mixman, does not appear to work on Windows XP Pro (Media Edition). The funny thing is, that while the company still sells the product, they appear to have quit supporting it. All of my emails to try and identify any sort of a work around or solution to getting the software running have been completely ignored. One of my biggest pet peeves is shoddy support from vendors. This pisses me off even more so since I supported the company and their development through three different upgrades of the software that while discounted for being upgrades, still wasn't cheap. Hopefully they will get their act together, but I'm not too confident that this will happen any time soon. Time to start looking for new software.