Lament to an Idiot

[morethansleeving]

I have a story for you about an idiot. He shall go unnamed for the time being *cough cough*.

He has been working on a major table design in FP, eventualy to be built to a hard table. The other night, he completed the virtual table in its entirety and was celebrating putting that chapter of the project to bed.

This guy was of course not bright at all. He had no backup, and had been working exclusively off of an 8g flash drive. Durring the save process, the power in the house burped and my .. i mean his machine reset. Upon starting the machine again, everything was fine except the .fpt file. It had become corupted and would no longer open. No errors would come up, it just wouldnt open when he tried to load it.

50 hours of design , 50 hours of rule writing, and 150 hours of coding time were all gone. I.... I mean the smegging idiot must now start over.

The moral of the story guys and gals.... save often and always make backups. then check your backups to make sure they execute. If you don't, you may end up like.... me.

Peace
:verysad:

 

[sleepy]

I don't know if it would work, but have you tried any file recovery or Undelete programs to see if you can recover the last working file?
These programs are iffy and usually cost $$$, but there are demo versions that sometimes allow saving one file.

There are also free Undelete programs under the GNU. It might or might not work though:
EDIT: You do not have to give this site your e-mail to get the program. When prompted, just click Close. The next page has the download links.
http://undeletemyfiles.seriousbit.qarchive.org/

 

[sleepy]

Also, don't make any changes to the flash drive until you've either recovered the file or give up trying.

The 'GNU Undelete program' I linked to above turned out NOT TO BE A FREE GNU PROGRAM,
so I would look around for a FREE GNU flash drive file recovery/UNDELETE program from a legitimate source. The above program is a commercial demo limited to 10 uses and may not be safe, so be aware. I'm checking it right now.

 

[morethansleeving]

Hi sleepy,

Thank you for the suggestion. I don't know why i didn't think of it. I worked the problem till way too dang early this morning, and after many hours, unfortunately, had no success. At this point, I've already begun a rebuild, which is kind of a blessing in disguise. There were many aspects of the table that I feel will be worth a tweak or two and my code was extremely bulky and chickenwire. Luckily, I still have all of my original notes and sketches, plus i still have all of my psd design files and all of my sound and hologram animation files. I was able to rebuild at least the layout of the table within a handful of hours this morning. Now I can go forward with what I learned on the last table and hopefully have a completed table ready for testing by sunday.

Thanks again for the great suggestion. I do appreciate it.

 

[TheHermit]

I use this one for any data recovery I need to do: http://www.z-a-recovery.com/download.htm

 

[RockWizard]

I remember back in the "primitive days" of programming(DOS), my instructor DRILLED it into our head.....SAVE. One day, we're taking a test, and every time I got to something big or at MOST 5 minutes, I saved. One smart a$$ next to me ignored the teacher. 10 minutes before the class was over, we had a power surge. Guess who lost his test? Yep, the *big* a$$. Lets just say he almost soiled his undies trying to take the whole test in 10 minutes!