I was up until 0000 hrs. Friday night with a serious challenge. I was tinkering with my spreadsheet/database program Quattro Pro, which I use to keep track of jogging stats, IRAs, 401Ks, as well as pilot log book, when the system locked-up (crashed) and a little message appeared with the generic warning that “systems resources were low” or some such non-sense, and to “save your work to another file.”

These things happen infrequently but can be routinely handled, and are considered more of a nuisance then a disaster. Usually the remedy is to exit the offending program by rebooting the PC. You have to re-enter the data that you were working with since you last saved, which isn’t fun, so good practice is to save often. In my situation, and this was unusual, the error had erased the entire file! This would be disaster time. My running records lost; there is no hard copy. Trying to reconstruct 24 months of my pilot log book, for example, would have been… Oh! I don’t want to even think about it!

Okay. Don’t panic. Re-start Quattro Pro. Re-load the file. Nope. It’s empty allright. Lots of empty spaces and squares in blank columns. Not a pretty sight. Okay. No problem. I have backups. First though, let me try the Microsoft Undelete utility. This comes with windows and sometimes allows you to recover files that have been deleted but not yet overwritten. Ah! There it is. The erased file. But there’s a note. “File is destroyed” “Cannot be rebuilt” I had exhausted all of the simple possibilities. Go to Microsoft Backup. Select the recover function and insert the floppy into drive “A”. OOPS. Another message. “Backup file was created with Microsoft DOS 6.0 or 6.2 see the readme.txt in the MS-DOS 6.22 step-up disc.” Swell. It was true. The original full backup was made in January and I had since upgraded my operating system. Hey. It was free. Why not? This added complication I hadn’t figured on and I was now grumbling to myself. It was just further confirmation that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it… Okay. Dig out the backup diskettes of the MSDOS 6.22 step-up that I had made. All of these files are archived in a compressed state. There are two on a 5 1/2″ floppy and two more on a 3 1/2″. The first file is designed to run so as to expand automatically the other three. When I ran this the one file extracted just fine but it then prompted me to insert the other disc to work on the remaining two files. Another snag. The other floppy (3 1/2″) was on drive “B” and wouldn’t read as it was expecting to see it on “A”. This was getting comical. All I wanted to see was the &#$*!?% readme file so that I could root out my problem with the old backup. I would have to manually re-install the entire OS just to see the help message? My efforts were continually thwarted as the problem twisted and convoluted. I had a pile of floppy discs, 14 full backup plus 6 incremental backups, the two OS discs, in addition to the usual natural clutter on my desktop and on the floor. I half expected to see a message appear on the monitor which said, “Abandon all hope, Give up, Just forget it!”

Well, after some additional frowning and cursing, I got the idea to try and run MS backup from the DOS command line instead of from Windows. The reluctant machine bought it. The file was restored. The January version, that is. I still had a slew of incremental backups (the changes made since then to restore and bring the errant file completely up to date and back to life), to do. After a few dozen more mouse clicks and another 40 minutes I had merely succeeded in returning to the point were I was before I had turned on the machine in the first place. I love computers…