My post yesterday about that sinking feeling did not get resolved in a good way, unfortunately.  When I got up this morning to check on the progress, the data recovery software had indeed found all of the files… but none of the file names.

Everything was a mess of F2398B1.doc, or similar.  Tens of thousands of files, all told, none of them with identifiable file names.  I opened up a few of the .xls files at random, and they were readable, but not ones that I actually cared about by that point.  Most of the .doc files weren’t able to be opened by Microsoft Word 2011 — or, at least, not without knowing what kind of encoding they were in the first place, which I can’t tell without knowing what the filename should have been!

Not only that, but I wouldn’t be able to recover the files to the same 1TB drive where they resided.  And I didn’t have another storage device available with anywhere close to the free space where I could save these files.

No way to know which files were which, and nowhere to save them to.  I gave up.  This evening, when I got home from work, I wiped the drive.

I’m even going one step further and reinstalling the OS on my Mac Mini.  This little guy is going to be the media server to feed my Apple TV, so I don’t have to keep the portable hard drive connected to my laptop when I want to use the Apple TV.

It’s a lot of 1’s and 0’s that I’m deleting.  Many years of accumulated crap that I’m throwing away.  And that’s all right, I can let it go.  I can put the past behind, and look toward the future.

Every now and then, say ‘What the fuck.’  ‘What the fuck’ gives you freedom.  Freedom brings opportunity.  Opportunity makes your future.