Sunday, May 02, 2010

Far Too Clever

I've been working on my thesis again, having slacked off a lot the past few months. But having slacked off for so long, it's only recently that I discovered that I have misplaced one of my notebooks. That's pretty bad. But things get worse.

Yesterday, I needed a bookmark from XP. I upgraded to Windows 7 in January and haven't really used XP much since then. But I use Zotero to manage my references, so I do all my thesis research in Firefox.

So, I browse to my Firefox profile on the XP partition. The directory is empty.

...What.

Well, empty except the profile.ini file. Which points to the Firefox directory on the old Vista partition. And that's when I remember...

See, I had been hoping back and forth between XP and Vista. I had used only Vista for about a year, since it came with my lappy, but I had some problems (especially with games and older software). So when I re-formatted my computer last year, I put XP back on and swapped back and forth. Except I really didn't all that often. XP was fine and Vista was a headache, so I really pretty much only used XP> BUT, what I had done was, I had set up the Firefox profile to be the same on both (and in Linux when I booted to that). So, no matter which OS I was in at the time, I'd have all my bookmarks and recent tabs, seamlessly.

Which I FORGOT when I put W7 on. See, by that point I wasn't using Vista at all. So, while I made a careful backup of all my XP stuff (just in case), I didn't back up the Vista stuff (because, there wasn't any). Except, there WAS, because that's where all the Firefox stuff was stored.

So, all I have now is a profile.ini that points to a partition that no longer exists, and my most recent other backup is from 2008 (before I started on this current thesis). All because I was too clever for my own good. Sweet.

I'm having, like, the *BEST* week you guys!

2 comments:

  1. Have you tried a disk recovery tool to see if it can find at least part of the old file? Chances are slight, but hey...

    If it makes you feel any better, I lost months worth of work when the hard drive in my laptop failed and I spent days trying to recover the data. I say I lost months, because if I hadn't successfully recovered it, I'd have been set back at least a year.

    On the other hand, it doesn't take as long as you'd think to rewrite stuff, because you've already done it once and you remember the outline, at least, right?

    ReplyDelete
  2. i use xmarks, it syncs your bookmarks between computers and also backs them up online :D

    ReplyDelete