FOUND: Divine Intervention

Maybe two months ago, I accidentally deleted the boot sector (partition table) of my computer’s hard drive in the process of installing a new drive. What this means is that all of our data, though still intact, was impossible to access. Billions of bytes and many years of personal correspondence, photographs, creative artworks finished or in development (by me and by Tia).

I always keep two backups on separate physical media (a minimum best practice!), but in the process (it’s involved) I had destroyed access to both backups as well.

Ordinarily, various free or commercial tools can rediscover or rebuild a boot sector. But there were two difficult technical catches here: 1) The data was on a striped RAID array; one piece of data is on a first drive, the other piece of data is on a second drive; this array was also destroyed and would need to be rebuilt. 2) The data was in a truecrypt partition split over these drives. Truecrypt partitions are designed to be inaccessible without the “keys”, which were now either difficult to find or destroyed.

(Even the FBI cannot crack, and in some cases cannot prove the existence of, a well-made truecrypt container.)

I managed to non-destructively reassemble the RAID array, and after carefully making a sector-for-sector backup of the array, I scanned the backup. I found the operating system (Windows) and programs etc. partition quickly enough. I didn’t at first find anything indicating the truecrypt partition with our valuable data.

I tried many careful recovery techniques that “should” have worked, but increasingly, it seemed maybe impossible.

Now something else. A few weeks ago we vacated to the Northeast for my brother’s wedding (Yay!) After arriving home I soon realized my cell phone was nowhere. Tia called airlines, we scoured the house – nowhere.

This phone has pictures and videos of my kids on it that I never copied to my computer before losing it. This morning I realized this and pointed this out to God, who of course doesn’t need this pointed out to Him, but He is entirely about infinitely filling the universe with endless, countless babies. Children play on His feelings.

Dear God, if it is your will, return my cell phone to me. It has important pictures and videos of my kids on it.

Not one minute after uttering the prayer, I thought of and checked the obvious place (too obvious, embarrassingly obvious) and found my phone.

Hmm, I said to myself. That bait worked pretty well.

Guess where I tried this bait next?

This same day I got our data back. All of it, completely intact.

(I know that many ask the same and see no result. God restores everything good, only it happens on His time – which may mean the next life.  Or this life – case in point.  I thank Him for this!)

Next is a much more conservative data backup regime, and copying those pictures and videos of my kids..