I remember reading a thread on Swedish computer forum.
There was a guy who had “compressed” his whole media livrary and saved it to a floppy disk, reinstalled his computer and now wanted to restor the media files…
Yeah, what he had done was to misunderstand what an MD5 hash was, he thought it was an extremely efficient compression algorithm…
And this is one of the many reasons I tell people that “an untested backup does not exist”
So all you have to do now is go through all the combinations of bits for a file, flag the ones with the same MD5, and manually look through those to see which one it is.
A guy I know thought he made a backup of all his family photos on an external hard disk. He only copied the shortcuts.
He only found out after disposing of the old computer…
I remember reading a thread on Swedish computer forum.
There was a guy who had “compressed” his whole media livrary and saved it to a floppy disk, reinstalled his computer and now wanted to restor the media files…
Yeah, what he had done was to misunderstand what an MD5 hash was, he thought it was an extremely efficient compression algorithm…
And this is one of the many reasons I tell people that “an untested backup does not exist”
So all you have to do now is go through all the combinations of bits for a file, flag the ones with the same MD5, and manually look through those to see which one it is.
Ow.