I wanted to post this post right away to make sure anyone in my boat knows there is help coming soon. It took me almost a month to figure out how to do this so I hope you will save a month and even more important, a lot of pain and money.
The actual tutorial is coming as soon as I can finish it. I’m trying to make it very easy so that more people can benefit but believe me it wasn’t easy.
Stay tuned and don’t hesitate to keep pushing me daily to get this blog done.
Here is the start of the blog post:
How to Recover your Thunderbird Emails from an erased hard drive Disaster
So, you’ve accidentally erased your hard drive and all your email is gone? Perhaps you’ve already got all your photos back like I did by some simple forensics software but your emails are gone. For some reason it seems that the forensics software (free ones) do everything except save your email. I came across many paid pieces of software that claimed they could do it but I was convinced if open source and government level software could recover photos and PDFs that surely there was a way. I was right, thank goodness. I am creating this tutorial for you to follow and hopefully recover your email as well.
Before we begin, let’s take a quick look at what we need to accomplish:
1. Carve your emails out of your hard drive
2. Get those emails into an email client so you can actually read them (we’ll use the best – Thunderbird)
3. Sort the meat from the bones so that everything recovered is in an effective and searchable format.
What you need before you begin:
1. A gigantic external hard drive – at least twice as large as the total size of the drive you lost. You should have one of these anyways to prevent this disaster from happening again in the future so it’s a good investment and much cheaper than what you would pay to have a professional recover your files (upwards of $2000.00)
2. A computer running Ubuntu 13.10. This tutorial [insert tutorial} will help you
3. A basic understanding of Ubuntu 13.10 including how to find the terminal and how to open applications. This tutorial will help you {insert tutorial}
4. The software Foremost installed on your computer via the terminal/command line. This tutorial will help you {insert tutorial}
So I’m reading a news article (rare) when I come across this article about some chick (is that politically correct?) who got swept away (literally).
I think the point of the article was to confirm that the woman didn’t end up falling off the corner of the earth but it got me thinking about the true meaning of this video. You really need to take a minute to watch this. You can start watching at 30 seconds in to get the point.
At first I chuckled the same way as the 99% of the other people watching and filming and did a short belly laugh when the goofy sounding drunk college student said these words
Dude. Somebody should probably go save her.
So I watched the video again and noticed that not only were there many people standing around on the other side of the torrent but there were a lot of voices near the camera too.
Nobody went to save her.
Then I started thinking about his words ‘somebody’.
Who is somebody? Isn’t the goofy voice guy somebody? Oh… I get it. It’s the ‘general somebody’. It’s the same ‘somebody’ we blame for all of the mishaps and failings of the world.
“Somebody should run for politics who isn’t corrupt.”
“Somebody should really come up with a win-win way of doing business.”
Somebody‘s best friend is ‘they‘. They and somebody are clones – one and the same person.
“They should really do something about the government wastage in this country.”
“They should really create legislation to stop large corporations from ruining people’s lives.”
“I heard that they‘ve found a cure for cancer.”
“They should really come up with a kind of computer that has higher security and doesn’t violate you privacy and get lots of viruses. Oh wait.. they did.”
It’s also interesting to note the use of ‘dude’ in this video. Is he speaking to his friend, a ‘dude’? No. He’s speaking to the ‘general dude’ which in turn means that he’s speaking out loud to himself and anyone else who might like to hear his thoughts. Here are a few more examples of such usage of ‘dude’:
“Dude! Check out that couple tongue wrestling by the mailbox.”
“Oh, dude. I can’t believe I forgot my textbook.”
“Dude…. *tokes reefer*… I’m like so stoned.”
So, in a complete sports-commentary-style analysis of Goofy-Guy’s statement:
Dude: I’m now vocalizing and pointing attention my internal thoughts so others can hear and discuss them
Somebody: someone other than myself, the general somebody, the un-faced somebody upon whom I blame for the bad things of the world
should: a word that removes certainty, a conditional recommendation, a suggestion to be considered but not necessarily acted upon
go save her: the command given to go and save this woman from a frozen posterior and possibly death
Why didn’t Goofy-Guy just turn to his friend and say ‘GO SAVE HER!’ It’s obvious she needed saving. She was rocketing down a street in frozen water, unable to stop, freezing her butt cheeks off. He didn’t say this because it would project the responsibility and guilt of not doing the right thing onto someone else. That might make them feel uncomfortable. And making someone feel uncomfortable in Canada is akin to genocide.
Why didn’t he say “I’M GOING TO SAVE HER!” Because he didn’t care enough. The empathy level towards this woman was enough to vocalize concern but not enough to take action. His conscience at least recognized he should do something but he was more concerned about staying warm and hanging with his friends, while assuming that Mr. Somebody was already taking care of her salvation somewhere down this newly-formed river.
Dude. Somebody should probably go save her.
Just when you thought Goofy-Guy and Torrential Tracy had been analyzed enough, I started thinking again. The image of this woman standing strong, yet in an obviously stupid position of risk, and then being swept away to possible destruction stuck in my mind.
Why was Torrential Tracy standing there in the first place? Why was she trying to cross? Was she showing her bravery? Was she late for her class?
And where were her friends of reason standing on the side screaming at her to stop being stupid and come back to safety? Maybe she was alone.
I started thinking of the foolishness of youth. We put ourselves in obvious risk of danger every day. Where are the wise elders to stop us from wading out into the torrents? Where is the voice of reason? And when we slip and foolishly get swept into the sea of sin and destruction, where are the people to reach out a hand?
I’m guilty.
I’m the proverbial Goofy-Guy in the video who said: