Tips for more efficient computing

It was 9:45 p.m. and I was deeply engrossed in watching JR pull off another dastardly deed when the phone rang. I cheerfully answered “Hello” and was instantly met with an hysterical “You’ve got to help me! I am in real big trouble and the world is coming to an end!!” Naturally I was concerned?EUR??,,????'??+the world coming to an end would put a real damper on next week’s episode?EUR??,,????'??+so I pulled by attention away from the television and tried to concentrate on what the caller was so upset about. “Wait a minute,” I said, “what is so serious? and, by the way, who is this?”

“Ron, this is G. A. Helms and I’m finished! I think I just erased the entire hard disk on the computer at work! Allour drawings, client files, programs, everything and when the boss finds out, I’m dead meat!”

Sound familiar? If not, consider yourself either well educated or extremely lucky. It is a rare computer user that has not felt the stab of panic when he or she realizes that the last press of the return key has destroyed something valuable. Well, take heart, depending on just what you did when you hit that return key, there may be a way to save the world and your data.

Re-incarnating your data

In order to understand how it is possible to save your erased or deleted data, we need to explore a little bit about how the Disk Operating System (DOS) takes care of storing your programs, drawings, letters, and other data. Picture in your mind a large upright file cabinet. Inside the drawers of the filing cabinet are lots of file folders with blank pieces of paper in them. On top of the cabinet lays a three ring index-binder with blank paper in it.

The first day you got it, the storage system in your computer was remarkably similar to this file cabinet and index-binder. The system was ready to store whatever you put on the “blank paper” in the files and by entering a name and location for the file in the index-binder, it was easy to retrieve the data you had stored. Of course the “blank paper” was the magnetic storage media in the computer and you didn’t have to worry about making the entry in the index-binder because DOS did that for you automatically. By now you’re probably saying “So what? How does that help me save something that was accidentally erased or deleted?” Because when you erase or delete a file or files from your computer’s disk, you don’t actually erase the data. A11 you really do is to erase the entry in the index-binder that tells you and the computer where to find that data in the `’file cabinet.”

Enter the Entrepreneur

With so many computer users erasing and deleting data and programs that they really didn’t want to, and since the programs and data weren’t really being destroyed, it only stood to reason that some computer whiz would develop a way of recovering those lost flies. The computer whiz was Peter Norton and his program called Unerase became an instant hit. Using this program is a little like cheating the Grim Reaper. All that is required is that you supply the first letter of the file that you erased. The program then goes about recovering the file.

There are a couple of small catches: since the number of “papers” in the computer is always fixed, the computer uses the “papers” of erased files to store new data. What this means is, if you erase something that you shouldn?EUR??,,????'???t have, STOP?EUR??,,????'??+don?EUR??,,????'???t do anything until you have used Unerase (or one of several now available that do the same thing). The other catch is, these programs only work if you have simply deleted or erased files. If, for example, you had re-formatted the disk (hard or floppy), then there is no hope because the formatting operation actually wipes all data from the surface of the disk rather than simply erasing the index entry.

This may sound stupid to some, but re-formatting the hard disk is something that is deceptively easy to do. All it takes is to forget to specify a drive designator when you are reformatting your hard disk. For this reason, many people take the Format com program completely off of the hard disk and store it on a floppy.

A perhaps more efficient way of ensuring that the hard disk doesn’t get reformatted is to create the Format Bat file listed below. Because this file is a ?EUR??,,????'??Batch” file (bat extension) it is executed before the Format Com file and since the Batch file automatically supplies a drive designator, it is a lot harder to accidentally reformat the hard disk.

Back to Jr’s Dastardly Deed

What happened to Mr. Helms? After he calmed down, we determined that he had simply erased all the files in the root directory of the hard disk. I told him about Unerase and how to go about using it to restore the files before the Boss found out. He was able to quit worrying about being “Dead Meat” and I got to see JR prove, once again, that Cliff Barnes is a wimp.