Stupid Microsoft, Stupid Me
4 comments July 6th, 2007
In all my years of owning MS OSs (and I’ve actually bought them for the last ten years), two weeks ago I finally needed MS support for the first time. I bought Vista Ultimate for a bazillion dollars in January, so I figured I’d be able to get it. Not unreasonable, right? Nope. Only 90 days, and then you have to pay $60 for a single support call or email. I didn’t bother, support wouldn’t have been able to help me unless they were willing to contact the app development team.
I blame myself, though, for being stupid enough—for the first time, ever—to rely upon a Windows bundled application for something critical.
Here’s a tip: if you use “Backup and Restore” on Vista for file backup (not system backup), it writes a single file to the root of the backup media—like, say, your 500GB external hard drive—called MediaID.bin that, if it’s lost, your entire backup is unrecoverable. All the files are there in zip archives, which is fine for manual recovery for smaller ones. Anything large is split, within the zip files and across them. The pre-Vista version of these apps do this, too, but it was possible to simply concatenate the pieces back together. This doesn’t work with Vista. I suspect the idea for this ID file was for removable media like CD and DVD.
The actual backed-up files are in subdirectories and this ID file is the only thing placed in the root. I had also used the drive to manually copy files and directories I wanted to back up, and that’s how I ended up deleting this one, crucial file. It was stupid of me, but it’s also stupid design. And no one out there has a clue about how to recover these files. Short of getting obscure info from MS, I’m going to have to reverse engineer the structure of the catalog files, the ID file, and its generation. Then I’ll write a small utility to do the recovery and release it. I was going to do this when I thought the files could be concatenated—I thought, hey, this should be relatively easy and all these other folks with this problem will be so pleased to have the utility. Nope. Now the problem will be much more difficult to solve.
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