I found missing parts of my papers in amongst my research files! Such a relief because I was scrambling for months trying to rewrite my papers for different formats. I’ve taken my pearlwork off my frame* to put Elsa on there because I really need those extra stones on asap. It’s easy to put her back together- basically I want to add boning channels so I can put lacing in the back as the zip keeps snagging on the under layer. The underlayer needs a gusset under the arms just to allow for slightly easier changes as moisturiser and sweat do the thing that makes it hard to pull stretchy garments on.

I’ve had to take ownership of my harddrive again. And I’m so impatient that I can’t reinstall my printer or software for images and documents yet. But for now I’m getting the pdfs under control.

*It’s so heavy! And it’s probably good I’ve taken it off now as the new pearls make the appliques very firm so the edges lift when the velveteen folds. It will be fine I think if I make sure to tack the velveteen to the support and then through the appliques.

It’s Not who I want to benefit, no, not even people on SocMed. A hint:

One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.

I had made huge strides in productivity for two days but I still kept having difficulty moving files. What looked like the familiar photos app I use for looking at my research images was set to run at start up and then in the background. Continually even after ended the task. So then I had a look at the app and oh no.

Same file name, same icon, but a new app that is cloud based. The app I had been using is now a “legacy” app you have to download. Needless to say I did and deleted the new one.

But that’s ethically wrong, surely? You don’t substitute a new app with the same name and icon, you give it a new name, you give it a new icon.

So then you ask, why? Well the default settings were to collect data. Images have much more information in them that the pixels and location. Further, two apps recommended to use with it also collect data and it goes to their AI. To create images and video from your photos and any information about what’s in them. The privacy notice says:

The editor saves project data such as editing progress information, titles, or media file names in your [app] account, but not the associated video, audeo, and image files you added (unless you enable content backup.)

I’m sorry, that’s a huge amount of data by default, and then all of it in a backup- you know how we’re all encouraged to backup everything?

But even without those editing tools, that’s photos of my friends and family, that’s photos I’ve got for my research, that’s images I have created from my research the photos app has taken data from already.

So AI basically gets on my work, my curation of information, even before it leaves my PC.

Holy crap.

And no, there is very little information on this substitution, so I started clicking multiple apps and now clock (you know for alarms, a timer) now opens in “focused sessions” and the default setting?

You need the Spotify app to enhance your focus sessions with music and podcasts.

What the hell?

The media player is also new, you can use the legacy one though that is under “optional features” so now there are different ways to get the old apps back. Three Dark Patterns already.

If you open the calendar? It opens then closes to open what used to be just an email app. You have to log in before you can find the settings, another Dark Pattern. If you uninstall the app, you get your calendar and email apps back. But how do you know you can delete it? You can go online and ask.

I’m not surprised by all of this. Just the extent. It probably is the reason for the BSOD with the September update. That’s a lot of change that goes right into the registry and already set privacy and security. And no it was not limited to “preview” builds though a lot of fans of the tech tried gaslighting people into taking the blame for allowing preview updates.

Be default we are all teaching AI when we type into any field, even for our eyes only. Ever noticed how your typos get saved to your custom dictionary so you can make the same mistake over and over again? Ever right clicked in a text field when using a browser to look at spell check options? Notice that the enhanced version has every single keystroke uploaded to the cloud?

No matter how much influencers make from monetising each word, each image, each video, each sponsorship, it’s a tiny fraction of what the tech companies make monetising all of that. So much so they want all of us trying to be influencers, grabbing at the crumbs left over from what they take.

And the worst part comes back to what I wrote earlier: if this was just my data I’d be furious but it’s not, is it? And it means that in turn my data is being collected from everyone who has emailed me, taken a photo and tagged me, so we simply can’t just disconnect either.

And I worry about the physical costs on my hardware. I can’t afford to replace this PC. I have used other OS and I still have my original installation CD in case I get desperate.

Anyway. Each time I have a few hours of productivity I have to stop and figure this stuff out. It’s not like we are using freeware either. We pay a lot of money for the operating system. And this still applies by default for those who buy the full business suite. Though with a better tool to understand what you can do and all in one place.

But I have finally got files separated, and file names shortened and it’s actually really inspiring rather than simply a really hard on my body chore.

I can bypass interference app by app by disconnecting from the internet, turning off/deleting apps that are triggered simply by the presence of an associated file (and multiple apps per file) in a folder. So yes, I’ve been very right, I just now have a clean slate OS to be able to prove it.

The usual blame is: You have too many files; You shouldn’t use large images on documents (also you should avoid long filenames, what?); You should use a third party program; You should use icons not thumbnails (even though the issue persists when you do.) So far so much gaslighting, I actually fell for it- well I do have millions of files including little icon files from saved webpages I guess…..

I reached a point yesterday where I broke. And I reinstalled the OS.

I also reached the point I just cried. Three years wasted on this. All I could think was I could have spent more time with my friends and family and Carlo. I could have worked on my actual projects. But this is 20 years of my life at risk. My entire body of work. My future work.

But I found out what it is by doing that, no one can accuse me of installing anything or messing with system files this way.

And now I have to let go of so much anger because it’s actually very simple- if only it was ever admitted to. But it explains the strange error messages like needing admin permission to move a file despite having permission to do so, it leads to error messages that path lengths are too long (even when under 50 characters) it leads to errors that the file is open in another program if you try to delete it.

So I’m going to have to keep dealing with this as the way to avoid it is not best practice.

I’m still behind, I still have to do this work, but I can finally, hopefully, start to be able to dedicate a bit more time with those I love.

So as per my posts about the effort to recover files, journaling for files includes all the information about where to find the file, the history of where it has been etc. But there is more information connected to files and folders than even that. I’ve had issues with files taking forever to show in a folder and it’s always blamed on end user for having too many thumbnails. Except it happens with icons too. Too many files lol is not a serious answer.

Instead what happens is some program is triggered and/or stalled while those thumbnails are loaded and if you clear them then they all suddenly appear. So it’s not that you’ve got too many files it’s that one or more of them is holding the rest up. I can’t find any specific information but my suspicion has been raised a few times. One was that the pdf editor I loved created its own sort of journaling file right in there with my documents, and everywhere I had a copy of that file. Yeah. And it was a broken file. It never actually updated when I moved a file out of the folder.

And the built in sort of journaling related file did the same. So I had to batch delete all of them. They were misleading apps as to what files to look for, causing them to keep looking rather than give up. Over the years we’ve also had databases of thumbnails inside the folders that are no longer used, and I still have to batch search and delete those.

So then my second suspicion was raised when I got errors that if I moved a file the path would be too long. The full path was under 50 characters from drive letter. But my fresh install did autoselect my computer name and that sucker was as long as allowed which is like 15 characters. Shortening that shouldn’t affect things but the pretty path as displayed in the folder? Yep, from desktop (that’s 7 characters there) to This PC to my drive name through each folder to the file. And I suspect that’s the path at issue. Okay. But it doesn’t explain why the same file, same drive, same folder structure, would be fine in one folder and not the other.

So then comes a humdinger. I needed admin permission to move some files (like a scan I did through my printer and not the third party app the full and custom install comes with) that I created as this same user for some reason. Now both of these issues result in a dialogue box explaining the error. So these interrupt the movement (and journaling) of these files.

Ownership did work recursively, but permissions did not. That is fortunately possible from the first subdirectories and then yes recursively.

I swear I never had any issue like this with the pro version I initially installed. I don’t know when this broke, but it shouldn’t have. I might be able to see if I can figure that out.

Anyway. So I’m still struggling and yesterday I was ready to throw it all away. There is a limit I can do each day due to pain, but also focus. And this has stolen far too much time. I hate how I don’t have the day to even think any more. It used to be that I could at least mull ideas over once pain stopped me. Now I can’t even watch a tv series because it requires investing memory to the plot. And focus to even get through a show. I’m not a social media scroller really. But I’ve had to start destressing by watching things I don’t need to dedicate to memory. I stick to a few accounts, only checking in on news I need to know.

So I am very good at managing stress, and using my free time. But my on time? That’s being stolen by all of this tech fail and my poor body being so limited by the damage in my Achilles. One would be tough but you have many more options for being able to move. But both? And it’s not like my RA has gone. I have retreated in the last few years but it’s more complicated than I think people can really imagine.

If you have limited time for your mind to focus and learn then the instinct is you can use your body. But I can’t, and vice versa.

At least for right now I know that my consolidated back up drive is safe. It’s allll mine. And I can try to sort each individual drive later. So I know how to try to get control of what I can. It’s that in this case that control should have been there from the start.

I thought my two original ssds had failed. Nope! Wow! So I’ve now got 5 ssds backed up including the dinky little one my OS is on. I was able to wipe the boot partition on the one I used for so much of my work which means I’ve finally managed to work my way back in time to that point where I bought the ssd that developed bad sectors. Which is great.

I’m still at a bit of a loss as to what computer I used between the fire and my current build. Definitely used some little netbooks, but I spotted a tower that rings a bell but I won’t have the info. It might be in a receipt as it would have been part of a bulk replacement of… all our electronics.

Anyway, I’m excited as I’ve found my full notes for my first Anne of Cleves presentation and probably a much better system of how I organised my research. With so many copies now of the same files I can take it easy and stop stressing because it really has been so difficult.

I’ve got memory and CPU issues sorted. Not a memory leak, just a lot of bloatware. A heck of a lot. This all did trigger fibro very badly yesterday, and I’m running on empty today, but I now have a really exciting opportunity, well multiple, which needs me to have my work safe, readily accessible.

I’ve managed to semi luck into having my work accepted for conferences but I nearly missed out on this opportunity because I had been so focused on this data loss issue before and after the end of the CFP. So I submitted my paper very late, and my title was to short then too long. So I need this stability to be able to make sure I’m on track to present properly. And I still need to publish my previous papers.

So yes, my NR work is incredibly central to my life for a year or so.

Two days, two days, to check ssd/hdd model numbers against non commercial websites. SMS is a deal breaker but instead of being able to look at a model number and say “aha, this series uses SMS and the other CMS” no, now they’re interspersed. Oh no. Did I create a basic or dynamic disk… nope phew. I just want to create content, you know? But I have a 4T 3.5″ harddrive to get everything off the drives I’m concerned with. But I think the drive that “failed” didn’t. I’ve checked it with every tool there is, and yes. Virtual memory was way too low. And I was right in interpreting a paging error as an error to do with… you know… paging. It matters as well that my physical memory was burdened and that I’ve had to watch processes for a few years now because of how slow folders have been to load.

But what was supposed to be a five minute fly by post had to be delayed because of course suddenly my theme broke and my blog disappeared. So ick, stunt blog page in the meantime.

Element tags used to be lovely and easy, now though I won’t be able to readily export and import my own content should I decide to change CMS. This is already a bit of an issue with social media. Instead of element tags being descriptive they’re now alphanumeric strings. This makes it harder on engineers because while yes you can copy and search for those strings they aren’t intuitive. And while the tags I’m looking at for my own site are descriptive they’re getting really unwieldy, and that’s were errors creep in too.

And this matters because I had to edit the elements and it’s not intuitive.

So a past post I titled a Comedy of Eras? Yeah it’s felt like I’ve passed through a few of them this week.

But there is even more good news, but I can’t share that yet.

Oh thank goodness. The data that was lost was the directions to the files. A simple recovery tool found 800K of them, and I was able to recognise files I deleted deliberately and files that weren’t. So yoink, got them copied at least the images and documents, I’ll need to go through to find the rest.

But what caused this completely different issue to my other disk issues? I have no clue. But I know my printer was trying to connect to an app every single second (filling my error log.) And that device management was trying to connect to a non existent server almost as often (partially filling my error log.) And the errors from my drive interspersed.

Searching for information about each error in the log results in either dismissal (all can be safely ignored) to catastrophic (harddrive is failing) when it’s more about the context.

I haven’t wanted to reconnect any drives but this looks to be a somewhat unifying theory “-disk write caching … may also result in the loss of information if a power failure, equipment failure, or software failure occurs.”

So Occam’s Razor would suggest that this is likely causing data loss, luckily only what was being written (as in where to find files) but I still have no further information to distinguish between equipment and software failure. It would be an incredible coincidence that a new platter drive from a well respected brand is failing when the reason my ssd failed was a firmware issue from the shipped drive that wasn’t patched until after they failed so many of us. No, it wasn’t available to update on first use, and once it started to fail updating can’t rescue it. The issue affected drives manufactured between 2021 to 2023.

It could be a coincidence and my cables are failing. Though I’ve had more issues with USB cables and chips which has resulted in needing to open the casing, and taking drives out to put them in new enclosures.

The biggest problem though is that I’m acting like a data centre as far as all this software and hardware is concerned. My build is for gaming- lots of writing- and this issue has only been the last few years. Yes prior to that ssds failed, but at the end of their lives. Not brand new.

So. New cables. Figure out OS configuration. Figure out how to install older printer drivers (probably from my back up.) And try to not stress buy a new hdd given you need to check specific model numbers to know if they are SMR or CBR because…. of course “SMR as data storage, CMR for recurring write processes.” Ditto not forgetting to check what format the drives are in. Data storage is what I thought I was after but, again, my work essentially is data processing. So the external I backed up to is really to copy huge amounts of data and to then transfer it to another drive, wipe and repeat.

I can reformat it but given it probably has the least potentially corrupted files I’m not doing anything to it.

So the holding pattern remains. Luckily there are no currently time sensitive needs to access it all. And I’m not willing to risk all that new information for my Anne of Cleves and North Rhine work nor allll of the record of my life, family, and friends.

It’s just so much across time and space to lose.