4 March 2005

Cleaning up can be bad

I have a number of disk utilities to help keep Windows trim. Bits and pieces are left all over the place from programs being added and removed and data in and out, so I ran the disk cleanup part of the program and it went and did it's thing. Normally I always run the program with the various prompts so I can see what it was doing. This time I didn't. And it went and cleared out all temp files. Including the one in My Pictures which I named temp for photos I had not organised yet.

I only discovered after I had already replaced my nightly backup, and I ran a disk defragmentation which resorts files on the disk into a more efficient positions. The end result? I lost tons of photos from November to February. The photos prior to that I had copied to my laptop to show to family back home on my Novemeber trip.

The lessons?
1. Don't name folders temp unless they really are temporary and can be deleted.
2. Don't take the default option of any program unless you are really sure!

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