Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I was sat at my study desk last night doing my usual thing….. “Oh, I better backup my docs, I’ve not done it in a while” (that’s in my head by the way and not me talking to myself!) –> USB HDD connected –> ‘Start’ – ‘Run’ – ‘SyncToy’ –>

‘Run’ –> “right, back to work” –> “time to explain EIGRP variance” (after a comment from another blogger requesting it – I thought it would be a useful exercise) –> ‘My Documents’…’EIGRP’ –> “WHERE’S IT GONE!”
The directory structure was fine but over the course of a couple of minutes I had lost an incredible number of files… ‘Favorites’ – 50% empty, ‘My Pictures’ – 90%, ‘Cisco Learning’ – 90% (where ALL of my notes, workbooks, dynamips labs, etc resided), ‘Articles’ – 100%, it looked like this:

Basically, what had happened is that due to the fact that I had been an idiot and thought “I might edit a file whilst it’s on the USB HDD” I had left the Microsoft SyncToy mode to synchronisation which means any moves, adds, deletes, and changes are synchronised between two folders – one folder was my login profile inc. ‘My Documents’, the other was a folder called ‘Synchronised’ on my USB HDD.  During the synchronisation my USB HDD had failed and for some stupid reason SyncToy has decided that means everything is empty…  EIGHT months work + a lot more gone in a matter of seconds!  How much of it have I managed to retrieve?  a few old versions of my notes up-to BGP from a .pst file that hadn’t been lost, but nothing else!  That means no QoS, Multicast, MPLS,  IPv6 etc etc – probably the areas I need to focus on most!  I have tried file restoration from my c: drive without any luck and the USB HDD now spins for a few seconds and then gives up.

Sometimes life throws challenges like this at you so I’m just going to have to get on with it, but what I have learned from this experience is that I need to go back to backing-up my backups J