It can be a fun hobby. All she wanted was her songs and pictures. She managed to save her hard drives but he took the rest of the computer. I got taken out to breakfast and she got me some cool computer parts. I have new respect for the Salvation Army where she got her salvaged new computer. I was able to transfer all of her files that she thought she had lost due to either a computer virus or a bad power supply. I didn't even have to drive but got chauffeured around. What a fun geeky date.

Nice, I love using live usb's of Arch Linux and tools like scalpel, or just a simple hex editor to recover data. Like you said, it can be a fun hobby.

I had these songs. There must have ten thousand I had saved for years of collecting. Most were WAVs but I did have some MP3s. It was a six GB hard drive cram full of them. The OS was severely tortured. Yes, it was Windows. But I installed an OS on another drive and I was so delighted that even pictures there was no way I could ever get back showed up. With just Windows Explorer and the copy and paste I was able to burn to DVDs. The advent of the USB flash drives really made saving more easier. Linux has some awesome programs now. I am especially glad to have found System Restore CDs by Gentoo and Parted Magic. Even Ubuntu has the Redo one.