If something other than the hard drive itself failed. I am confident that I'll be able to get the files. I also save hard drives, some of them going back to when 20M was the "OMG-you'll-never-full-that-up" size, and many of them in external cases being used as backups attached to current computers. I have four other computers in the house, so when that one wouldn't boot up, I only gave it a half-hearted effort to find out why, thinking, of course, that I'd backed up everything important. (All the PDF charts I purchased, I have saved four times over in different backup storage locations. Charts I created for myself? not so much.) One saving grace is that I posted the picture I used to create the chart on the opening post here, so if I can't get to the chart, at least I have the image I used to create the chart. I'll have half a chance of the colors matching.SteveM wrote:I'm so paranoid that I'll find myself needing a file off of an old hard drive that I have a box of them in the attic going back at least 20 years. Your external enclosure should work just fine to get your chart off of it so no worries there. Heck, I've got an old laptop that had the internal SATA controller die on it so I moved its drive into an external USB enclosure and picked up right where I left off.
Even if you had to make it over again, the output of Richard's program should be the same if you can remember to set everything exactly as before. You would then compare some pages in the first two rows to ensure that your recreation was correct. But you aren't going to need to do that.
Anyway, I hope y'all had a nice day. Stay tuned for the conclusion of my chart drama, tomorrow evening with any luck.