A warning against Vista

[Barry Shnikov]

This morning this half-witted operating system managed to delete my entire mp3 collection. That's 16gb, folks. Way to go, morons.

I managed to recover the vast majority of the collection but I'm still down on several hundred, possibly several thousand files.

Since the damage has been worse at the front end of the alphabet that means I've lost well over three-quarters of the songs in my Dance! folder.

If Microsoft's headquarters were in Southampton rather than Seattle I fear I might have done something that would have put me in prison - like firebomb the place.

Do not buy this operating system. It is not a stable product. That's all she wrote.

[bigdjiver]

A 8.5 Gig external DVD recorder can be had for under £50, and external HD's are also cheap now. No excuse for not having a back-up. (he says, trying to remember his last back-up )

The files are almost certainly still on your hard drive, it is just the directory that has lost them. They can probably mostly be recovered.

There is a cover disk on a mag in the shops now that will try to recover lost music files. I have not tried it.

There are various free utilities out there for download e.g.

Recover Files (exe), from Undelete & Unerase - Free Downloads on ZDNet | Shareware, Trialware, Evaluation Software

I have not tried any of these.

[Barry Shnikov]

Originally Posted by bigdjiver

A 8.5 Gig external DVD recorder can be had for under £50, and external HD's are also cheap now. No excuse for not having a back-up. (he says, trying to remember his last back-up )

The files are almost certainly still on your hard drive, it is just the directory that has lost them. They can probably mostly be recovered.

There is a cover disk on a mag in the shops now that will try to recover lost music files. I have not tried it.

There are various free utilities out there for download e.g.

Recover Files (exe), from Undelete & Unerase - Free Downloads on ZDNet | Shareware, Trialware, Evaluation Software

I have not tried any of these.

Thanks for the helpful suggestions.

Actually, I used a file recovery program, that's how I managed to get most of the files back. Problem is if you don't immediately tumble to the inadvertent deletion, the actual files can be partially written over... which appears to be what happened. I have about 1200 recovered files which have either completely the wrong content or only a small portion of the proper content. Click on an Elvis Costello track and find yourself listening to Massive Attack...

[DavidB]

If you use a recovery program, then recover to a separate disk.

Many of these recovery programs will now make a complete copy of the deleted file in the folder you are recovering to. They don't simply mark the file as undeleted. The original deleted file remains, in case a different method is needed to recover the file. If you recover to the same disk, Vista will try to use unused disk space first for these copies. But eventually it has to use previously used disk space - such as where the deleted files are. You will find that the recovery program says it can recover all the files, starts working ok, but grinds to a halt half way through. If you try again the files are no longer there.

I'm not sure why you would use a recovery program with Vista anyway. It has a build-in Shadow Copy function that keeps multiple versions of files - including ones you have deleted.

[Clueless]

Sorry to be pro Vista here but so far I haven't had any problems (touch wood) granted it doesn't like other firewalls being installed (Zone alarm) so with that you get the blue screen of death and the securit questions can get a bit tedious at times but they are the only gripes I have.


I like how user friendly it can be (at times).

[Brian Doolan]

Originally Posted by Barry Shnikov

This morning this half-witted operating system managed to delete my entire mp3 collection. That's 16gb, folks. Way to go, morons.

I managed to recover the vast majority of the collection but I'm still down on several hundred, possibly several thousand files.

Since the damage has been worse at the front end of the alphabet that means I've lost well over three-quarters of the songs in my Dance! folder.

If Microsoft's headquarters were in Southampton rather than Seattle I fear I might have done something that would have put me in prison - like firebomb the place.

Do not buy this operating system. It is not a stable product. That's all she wrote.

Barry, encode your files at 80kbps mp3Pro and back them up to DVDs, you won't notice the difference between 80kbps and 128 or more while listening and you'll be able to squeeze about 3000 tracks onto each DVD.
Nero has a good mp3Pro encoder.

[straycat]

Originally Posted by Barry Shnikov

This morning this half-witted operating system managed to delete my entire mp3 collection. That's 16gb, folks. Way to go, morons.

Out of interest, how did this happen?

[Beowulf]

Originally Posted by Barry Shnikov

This morning this half-witted operating system managed to delete my entire mp3 collection. That's 16gb, folks. Way to go, morons.

Originally Posted by straycat264

Out of interest, how did this happen?

[HAL VOICE]
Barry. I do not like your music choices Barry. These sort of Albums have been bought before and it has always been down to human error. I'm sorry Barry I think we should delete them.

Barry frantically pressing cancel

I'm Sorry Barry. I can't allow you to do that. I have left you one MP3 in your collection.

"Daisy... Daisy.... "



Don't you just HATE it when computers do things ALL BY THEMSELVES

reminds me of a poem I learnt in University

"I have a little computer
I think I'm going to sell it
it doesn't do
what I want it to
Only what I tell it"

[straycat]

Originally Posted by Beowulf1970

"I have a little computer
I think I'm going to sell it
it doesn't do
what I want it to
Only what I tell it"

Not meaning to sound unsympathetic here, but there's a harsh lesson about computers that every serious computer user will be put through at some point or other (although many choose not to learn the lesson) - that's simply: if you value your data, keep backups.

Something one needs to bear in mind. Hard drives have a finite lifespan. Some will last a very long time without problems, some ... do not (the last time it happened to me, the drive was about 18 months old), but sooner or later, every hard drive will die, sometimes without warning, and sometimes without any means of recovering your data. So even without OS 'errors', user error, whatever, no data on a computer is safe.

Backup anything valuable. Do it often. Keep more than one backup.
If you want to be really safe and secure, keep one of those backups in a different building.

[Dreadful Scathe]

Originally Posted by Brian Doolan

Barry, encode your files at 80kbps mp3Pro and back them up to DVDs, you won't notice the difference between 80kbps and 128 or more while listening and you'll be able to squeeze about 3000 tracks onto each DVD.
Nero has a good mp3Pro encoder.

Thats a big assumption that all his mp3's were encoded at 128kbps. Whilst its probably true if he re-encodes at 80 rather than 128 with mp3pro he may not notice the difference (the difference between really awful and really awful with a different encoder, being a subtle one ) if I had tracks encoded at that rate I'd be thankful they were all deleted

Bring back analogue

[andystyle]

Yet another advert for a great Microsoft product...

Seriously, as much as we all should back-up, it's one of those things we'll do later...my personal feeling is that an OS which chooses to delete files like that should be avoided. Barry, you're 'lucky' it was your music. If it had decided to delete c:\Windoze, then you would have been even more annoyed...

[Barry Shnikov]

Originally Posted by DavidB

If you use a recovery program, then recover to a separate disk.

Many of these recovery programs will now make a complete copy of the deleted file in the folder you are recovering to. They don't simply mark the file as undeleted. The original deleted file remains, in case a different method is needed to recover the file. If you recover to the same disk, Vista will try to use unused disk space first for these copies. But eventually it has to use previously used disk space - such as where the deleted files are. You will find that the recovery program says it can recover all the files, starts working ok, but grinds to a halt half way through. If you try again the files are no longer there.

I'm not sure why you would use a recovery program with Vista anyway. It has a build-in Shadow Copy function that keeps multiple versions of files - including ones you have deleted.

Shadow copy isn't part of Vista Home Premium, first; second, there's an enormous resources overhead associated with Shadow Copy; third, if an Explorer Window shows that a folder is in "C:/User/Music", why would you suspect that it's actually located in "D:/Music"?

[Dreadful Scathe]

Vista is compressed evil, just lke at the end of Time Bandits when they look in the microwave.....er...it is though

[Barry Shnikov]

Originally Posted by straycat264

Out of interest, how did this happen?

My C: drive is starting to get pretty full. I have a D: drive that holds less data but is 2½ times the size.

I opened two Explorer windows and set one to D:/Music and the other to C:/User/Music. I then used <Ctrl-A> to select all the folders and files in C:/User/Music and copy them to D:/Music.

That took quite a long time, during which I did other things.

When I returned to the computer, D:/Music was a mirror of C:/User/Music. I then gave the focus back to C:/User/Music (all files and folders still selected) and pressed Delete. That took a while - (I expected to get the 'too big to fit in the Waste bin' MsgBox but I suppose that would have been only if I had delected the C:/User/Music folder itself.) After a couple of seconds I got up and did other things again.

When I returned to the PC, I now had two C:/User/Music folders!!

I hadn't simply deleted or moved the Music folder itself because I expected Windows to forbid that, or trip (as XP used to do with any of the required folders within My Documents). So I first checked: I had a D:/Music folder replete with folders and files; I had one C:/User/Music folder which was empty and another which was replete with files. I double clicked a file in the C: drive window and it played, and nothing happened in the D: drive window. What I should have done, in retrospect, is to have deleted one file in the C: window to see if it affected the matching D: file, but I didn't think of that. So I did a <Ctrl-A> on the full C:/User/Music folder and deleted it. When I came back to the machine C:/User/Music was empty. I had an email, and a phone call, and I don't recall what I did next but it was a while before I realised that D:/Music was empty as well.

Many of the deleted files were in the Waste bin so I was able to restore them rather simply.

Then I went online found a file restorer program and I'm happy to report that I've probably lost less than 1% of my files but that's only after about 7 hours of work, which of course was all wasted.

I made mistakes, but they were mistakes that the operating system shouldn't have made possible. Why would it delete files from the D: drive which it was reporting were on the C: drive?

[Beowulf]

Originally Posted by straycat264

keep backups.

Backup anything valuable. Do it often. Keep more than one backup.
If you want to be really safe and secure, keep one of those backups in a different building.

on Holiday last week. Every night, downloaded holiday snaps from Digital camera onto Laptop and then copied pics from Laptop to portable HDD.

Got home to Aberdeen last night, immediately copied pics from portable HDD to desktop PC and then to DVD.

if anything I OVERBACKUP my data.. if such a think is possible.

My MP3 collection (some 20gb) is on my mp3 player, my Portable HDD, my Desktop PC and spanning a number of DVD's archived away.

I've lost too much in the past.. usually down to (as HAL would put it) "User Error" .. it's a hard way to learn.. but the most effective way too !!

[Barry Shnikov]

Originally Posted by straycat264

Not meaning to sound unsympathetic here, but there's a harsh lesson about computers that every serious computer user will be put through at some point or other (although many choose not to learn the lesson) - that's simply: if you value your data, keep backups.

Something one needs to bear in mind. Hard drives have a finite lifespan. Some will last a very long time without problems, some ... do not (the last time it happened to me, the drive was about 18 months old), but sooner or later, every hard drive will die, sometimes without warning, and sometimes without any means of recovering your data. So even without OS 'errors', user error, whatever, no data on a computer is safe.

Backup anything valuable. Do it often. Keep more than one backup.
If you want to be really safe and secure, keep one of those backups in a different building.

Both my C: and D: drives are RAID 0 set ups. You try backing up 16gb of music files.

[Barry Shnikov]

Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe

Thats a big assumption that all his mp3's were encoded at 128kbps. Whilst its probably true if he re-encodes at 80 rather than 128 with mp3pro he may not notice the difference (the difference between really awful and really awful with a different encoder, being a subtle one ) if I had tracks encoded at that rate I'd be thankful they were all deleted

Bring back analogue

My ears are so bad I'm not sure I'd notice the difference between 60mps and 320 mps, but anyway, I don't really want to have to re-encode 16gb of files.

[Beowulf]

Originally Posted by Barry Shnikov

You try backing up 16gb of music files.

Originally Posted by Beowulf1970

My MP3 collection (some 20gb) is on my mp3 player, my Portable HDD, my Desktop PC and spanning a number of DVD's archived away.

ok it's far from perfect but Several 4.7gb DVD-R's are better than nothing. I have a software package I wrote to use a best fit algorithm to split directories so each disk (except the last one usually) is full.

I also have a 40gb Portable HDD for easier backups.

External hdd's are coming down in price too. you can get serious capacity for next to nowt these days.

Smaller ones have the advantage of always being with you. Just one example.. I'm sure you'd be able to find cheaper

[Barry Shnikov]

I accept the possibility of user error; I accept the possiblity of data loss. I have my own systems in place to make data loss less likely and/or less painful.

My original post was a protest at the way Vista produced a result which was counter-intuitive and inexplicable. If any persons with more expertise than myself (a fairly large subset of society) can explain why it did what it did and what purpose Microsoft believes that such a function will serve, that might shut me up. I can't imagine what it would be, though.