Data Disaster

Take this as a warning, all of you out there who use ERASER and dabble with symlinks.  This is my story as far as I can figure it out.

I made a symlink to make my life easier on my new laptop.  Symlinks are new to Windows (Vista), but everything I’ve read led me to belieive it would be safe to delete a symlink.  My experiment didn’t work and I did just that, deleted the symlink.  This was earlier today or yesterday.

Just before I set off to bed tonight I saw that my fish bowl / recycle bin was full and decided to empty it.  And by empty it I mean that I used Eraser to securely delete the files.  It started off wiping what looked like temp Windows files and such, but it appeared to be only the first few of many more files to erase.  I let it continue.  After a second it started wiping what looked to be blog files.  I had recently backed up all my blog files while preparing for an upgrade.  I thought maybe I had made a copy of the folder and then deleted it.  I let it continue and Eraser kept chugging along.  Then it started to erase other, clearly more important files.  But in my poor judgement I let it continue.   It then slowed way down and indicated that it was erasing a very large TrueCrypt volume file.  Humm, the only encrypted volume I have on this computer is my financial data crypt.  Why would I have deleted that?  While letting it continue, I opened up the file explorer and checked my custome user folder where I happened to store blog files, important stuff, and encrypted volumes.  Sure enough, files were disappearing right before my eyes.  At this point I nailed the “stop” erasing button and a layer of sweat quickly grew on my brow.

What had I just done and how?

I don’t think I lost any thing major.  The encrypted volume, with my finanial files in it, had been backed up a week ago and I only changed them a little bit yesterday.  As for the rest of the files, I am not sure what I even had, so I don’t miss it too much… that it until I go looking for something specific.  I know I nuked a bunch of recipies Kathryn had saved.

My guess is that when Eraser was going through the recycle bin it found the symlink and followed it.   I set up a little test to see if I could recreate the mishap on dummy files.  The worst possible thing happened.  Eraser went back and started erasing more of my documents! WTF!

Needless to say, Eraser is currently un-installed right now and everything is getting backed up to an external storage drive.  Eraser will remain off my computer until I can figure out what happened or at least how to avoid it again in the future.  On a side note, I am testing some recovery freeware, Recuva.  It probably won’t help much, but I can hope.