A serious WTF??!! moment yesterday

[anysia]

I was going through some photographs I had taken, doing the usual edit logos out, cropping, and all was going quite well. I ported image over to another program that has this great "Removed purple fringe" tool, and anyone who has had back lit digital photos knows about this. All was ok, right until I tried to go back into my "Illustrations and Drawings" subfolder only to be told it didn't exist.
Whohuhwha?

I checked the directory where it was a sub directory and it wasn' t there. Thinking I had accidentally done a drag and drop and moved the directory, I did a CTRL Z on the desktop. Nope, not there. I did a search.. again, negative results. Panic is starting to set in. I used Iolo "Search and Recover" and nothing. No no no no no...

So, tried different file recovery program, and lo behold, I found them. Somehow the entire directory got deleted. If I had accidentally hit DELETE they would have ended up in the recycle bin. And I know I didn't delete it, as the working directory I was using wasn't even close.

I managed to recover all but a few, but since I am one for caution, I lucked out. I might have lost the JPG or PNG verson of a file, but I always save artwork as TIF, PNG and JPG.

I spent a goodly part of the late afternoon renaming the recovered files as close to their original names as I could, and then copying the entire directory with the subdirectories to a different harddrive.

Pardon me while my blood pressure returns to normal.

Comments

[stephbg.livejournal.com]

Did you get that charming blood draining feeling where the whole world stops for a moment?

I'm glad you're recovering (in all senses of the word).

[anysia.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. I was chanting "Oh no no no no no no no. (start Iolo.. negative results) No no no no no." Started Recover My Files. BING! Files found, and "Thankyouthankyouthankyou" was the chant.

Even after check program logs, I haven't found how they all got wiped. Guess it was a ghost in the machine.