Data, data, no where to put it

I had problems with my main computer the other day, it was acting weird, not a virus. So I also found at that point that my Seagate GoFlex 3TB Desktop drive was malfunctioning.

I made a new profile in Windows 8.1 and everything was fine, except for that Seagate drive.

It’s a real downer because ALL my old HD videos are on it. (Raw movies I took with my Sony Handycam since 2008, most recent years I put new ones on my main computer pictures drive.)

I wasn’t doing anything with them, I’m accruing more and more and more footage all the time, from concerts and festivals, and even that stuff I do hardly anything with. My plan was to get to all that old content when I built my big desktop. I did get that built, but then didn’t get decent software for it until later, and right now nothing is installed because I Refreshed Windows right before I made my new profile this time, and actually did do that for another reason several months ago, and my software has been dormant mostly since then.

I said all that in order to mean saying, even the Refresh of Windows didn’t fix my profile, I didn’t even think it would, just did it because I like to start over on computers.

So I tried TestDisk with the drive, and I had limited success in seeing something was still there. I finally made an Ubuntu Live DVD today and was able to use TestDisk to see there was my partition and all the data. Just wouldn’t function as a real drive. I don’t have another 3TB sitting around, so I can’t do anything more until I get a new one.

I have space I could move some stuff to, but that’s not really an option, unless I piecemeal it somehow, I’d rather clone the drive, a full image, at least. I don’t have that much space in one place, it’d take moving heaven and earth to accumulate it, but I’m not sure I could get enough space anyhow.

Which brings up another data saving project I was doing long ago, I was able to pull data using Xcopy on another drive, but wanted to fully image it, clone it too. Augggghhhh!

It’s not a big one, at least, only a 320gb I guess. Ha ha! Storage is so cheap compared to a few years ago. I need to get everything sorted out and onto new storage with backups and backups for the backups.

Not to mention even my web stuff I’ve not backed up in ages.

Getting Ubuntu installed was a chore. I installed it in space I made on our HP All in One. To get it dual booting I had to use a grub-repair thing, instructions found online worked out beautifully, but to get to that point I had to install Ubuntu twice. So hours of F’ing around at least I have a decent computer with dual booting now.