Greetings Everyone,
Several weeks ago I was doing some backtesting in Profitsource, and the backtesting was working fine...at least up to 18 hours. Yes, that's right, I said 18 hours. One thing that is always hard for me to resist is taking a huge data sample and running a backtest or two for several criteria. Sometimes it may be Elliott Wave, other times it may be a simple moving average. Typically this isn't that big of a deal, but that 18 hour thing along with the huge data sample brought my RAM to its knees.
At first, I didn't think much of it. I closed out Profitsource and I said to myself, "I bet I have a lot of junk I need to clean out of this computer, lets do a disk cleanup" You can see where this is going! I can't say it's the Profitsource. More likely the evil culprit was my RAM deprived system along with Willie Gates wonderful software we have all grown to love.
My system did the disk cleanup and asked for a restart...No problem...I've been there a million times before. When the Windows screen was trying to load, I received a friendly message that something was missing from my XP system. Not knowing what the screen was missing I called a friend of mine. He said on the phone, "Man...looks like your gonna have to reinstall!" On the old Windows 98 system, that never use to be a problem. I routinely wiped my hard drive clean every 6 months just to keep my 20 GB hard drive from going into system overload. A few questions immediately ran through my mind, "What have I backed up?", "If I backed it up, where did I put it", and most importantly, "I gotta look at my option positions before day break, wheres that old computer?"
After taking a few minutes to size up the situation I said, "well, I can't find that old computer, but I got the WIFI Pocket PC". That was all it took to ease my mind and continue with my daily habit of reviewing my equity and option positions. Now I'm back to data preservation mode. While looking at some positions on the little 4 inch by 3 inch square of my Pocket PC I began to wonder whether my system tests and literally hundreds of charts from Profitsource where still retrievable. I started thinking back at the countless hours upon hours I had spent gathering charts, analyzing, etc. I grabbed me a cup of Starbucks and said to myself, "It will be allright, I'm gone get crackin on this tommarow.
The next day came, and I made a few calls to some computer shops and data recovery services. The prices for recovery services ran from a minimum of $300.00 to around $2500...ouch that hurts! After stewing on it for a while, I pulled out the recovery disk and fired it up. When the screen pulled up, it asked me for the admin password to proceed to a restore point. I faithfully typed it in and ...NOPE...no go. The recovery disk hauntingly asked me over and over again for the correct password, and like a robot, I faithfully kept typing it in to no avail. "How can this happen..this piece of &*)%" Either out of sheer frustration or maybe just being cheap, I tossed the restore frisbee back in and went for the reinstall. The choices it gave me were to either do a clean install with no data saved or "we won't fully wipe you out, we will try to save something, but no guarantees". I jumped at the No Guarantee option.
The reinstall went fine...that is...until I tried to find my data that Windows had attempted to save. It was GONE...all GONE. Fortunately for me, I stumbled across a handy piece of software. The software ran me about $70/$80 bucks, but when it recovered 27GB of information I was more than happy I paid the price. Not only was my WORD, EXCEL, and Family JPEG's saved, but my all important Profitsource Charts. I did have to reinstall some software, but other than that...no worries.
I'm not trying to sound like a Ad here, but I was so impressed with the software I thought I would post it here. The name of the software is RECOVERMYFILES.
One more helpful note, if your Profitsource CD is more than 6 months old, call up tech support to send you an up-to-date data CD. First, because it was free and second, because I had to download a year and a half of data...and it wasn't pretty.
Later
Fibonacci 
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