A quick recap – 6 months ago, my laptop’s hard drive physically died unexpected, and my backup server got a bad firmware shortly afterwards that bricked the hardware permanantly and corrupted the hard drive partitions.  I lost access to all of my data files, including source code and version control repository for all of my Lebeau Software projects.

To give you a status update, I have not been able to recover a SINGLE FILE yet!  My laptop is functional again and I am able to work on new developments moving forward, but its previous hard drive is physically dead and unresponsive (and I don’t have the money to pay for that kind of professional recovery), and none of the downloadable recovery programs I have tried so far (and I have tried several) have been able to recover anything useful from the backup server’s corrupted hard drives.  I ended up resorting to making my own recover program from scratch, but my efforts are slow going due to time restraints, but I am still working on it nonetheless.

Fortunately, I am very hopeful that I should be able to eventually recover most of my data from the backup server’s hard drives, as they are fully operational in general, and the level of corruption on them appears to be minimal, just effective enough to render then unusable in a normal fashion, but most of the data is intact.  The backup server used a Linux OS and a Linux file system (XFS to be exact), so I am writing a program that can read the Linux XFS file system and make it accessible to Windows, then I should be able to copy most of my files like any other.  And before anyone asks, yes I have tried to perform an XFS recovery from an actual Linux OS, without much success yet.

I will post again when I have some more news to share.