i formatted my illusory hard drive
I'm very careful to put all of my data on a different physical drive than my Operating System, so if I need to blow it all out (as sometimes happens when you're running windows) I have a way to put everything that's important to me in one place and leave it untouched when I have to do the dirty work.
I just got a copy of XP and was exited to give it a whirl on my system. I entered setup and the first thing I did was take a deep breath and...format my data drive. The one critical moment where it's most important to make sure you're deleting the right partition. It took a little while for me to figure it out. That everything that is stored on my computer that's important to me was gone. Five years of photos, music, invoices, writing, original photoshop files, original templates for much of the print work that I do for our business, old difficult to find classic games and emulators, the original comps for every website I've ever done, installation media for hundreds of installed programs...and probably a bunch of things that I just haven't thought of yet. Oh christ, the fonts, the fonts....oh the humanity.
Luckliy, the bulk of the work and writing I do gets stored online, and the most precious of things are all in email attachments, the tinyblog, and on Robotic Cat Communications' servers. Plus, I put about 80% of the music and about 90% of the photos on Rzan's portable hard drive...so some of it will get recovered. I'll need a few days or weeks to let it all really sink in.
Whew. Non-attachment. I just hope I didn't screw anyone else. Now just to log onto all
my servers and type:
mv -r * > /dev/null
Then my non-attachment to data will be complete. Well, no it won't.
Mourn with me people, mourn for my lost data.