At the dept of revenue we photographed every document (tax returns, mail and various filings) that was received at the dept. The hardware, IIRC, was a 1995 Xerox server running a Sun Solaris and specialized software which controlled Beckman cameras which photographed both sides of a document simultaneously as each document was fed into the machine and pulled between two plates of glass. Clerks entered the date and description of the files and the resulting index was linked to the jpg photos automatically as batch files which were later processed and verified by other clerks before each batch was committed to the server. The jpg photos averaged 50-100Kb, depending on the size of the documents. As it turned out the system hung up or crashed on occasions and instead of doing a safe shutdown or an fsck on startup they just booted it up and worked away. Eventually it refused to boot. The It folks reduced it to an HD problem. They knew I was using a SuSE 6.3 system in my office so they brought it to me and asked if I could recover the data on it. While the OS was corrupted and wouldn't run, the HD could be mounted just fine. I used dd to create an a 2GB image of the file and then used a hex editor to isolate large blocks of text and jpg images. There were about 15,000 documents and associated index files containing identifying info. I was able to recover all but a couple hundred images and index sections.
A few years ago the daughter of a friend of my son lost her desktop HD and all the 1,400+ photos of her Wyoming vacation AND her senior year thesis paper, which she needed to submit to get her BS in Biology. A recovery company gave her an estimate of over $300 to recover them. She couldn't afford it. I used an early version of PhotoRec to restore ALL of ther jpg files and her thesis. It took about 5 hours, but I was asleep while it ran. My bill? $0.
You have to love the power and affordability of Linux
A few years ago the daughter of a friend of my son lost her desktop HD and all the 1,400+ photos of her Wyoming vacation AND her senior year thesis paper, which she needed to submit to get her BS in Biology. A recovery company gave her an estimate of over $300 to recover them. She couldn't afford it. I used an early version of PhotoRec to restore ALL of ther jpg files and her thesis. It took about 5 hours, but I was asleep while it ran. My bill? $0.
You have to love the power and affordability of Linux
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