So this is the only Mig I could find in my archives – a Mig 17A on display at the The Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum in Pooler, GA, just west of savannah. But this post has nothing to do cold war era Soviet fighter planes, this post is about MigRecover, a utility for recovering files from Windows Easy Transfer .mig files when your upgrade goes west, as mine did.
Back on April 28th I posted on how Dell had concluded my year old machine was not Windows 7 compatible after all and how they would send me an original image disk of my machine when shipped a year prior. Has it been a month already. Ive been really out of sorts with my machine far from where it used to be – kind of turned my whole world upside down! Anyway, when I received the image disk from Dell I installed it and soon had a clean windows xp machine one more. All I had to do now was reinstall all the software I wanted and get back to work. But wait, Microsoft had another surprise for me!
I'm an optimist and, as an optimist, I hadn't taken a full backup of my machine prior to starting the upgrade. Why did I need to? Microsoft and Dell had said everything would work fine and they would know, wouldn't they? So I just used the Windows easy transfer tool to prepare my documents for Windows 7 64-bit. I was going to have to reinstall my software anyway. But now I had a problem. Just like on-line banking, the vast majority of my software purchases have been downloads. Now I have copies of the downloaded software on external drives and backups, but the license keys – they were in my Outlook .pst file which was in my .mig file. So I wondered how I would read the .mig file to get my documents back.
Well, Windows Easy Transfer is a Microsoft tool so that's the first place to look. Nothing, nada, zip. Maybe the folks at Microsoft are also optimists and never conceived an upgrade would fail (or maybe they just don't care?). So back to Google and once again into the dark side, scanning obscure forums of obscure computer problems. Some discussions were dead ends but some held promise and then a glimmer at the end of the tunnel – migrecover. But where to find it?
At one point in time a Microsoft employee had been taking .mig files from people on the forums and recovering them with a private, in-house Microsoft tool. But then he stopped responding to the forum questions around mid-2009, never to be heard from again. Most likely Microsoft found out there was a realist in the house and sent him off to the gulag for optimism conditioning. But the tool he was using lived on and escaped into the wild. Traces of it abounded as it had moved around the torrents popping up on one site for a while only to disappear again. Eventually, I found it in Australia. There, in a land down under where women blow and men chunder, I found Visser Labs the web home of Michael Visser who has taken it upon himself to save the world – well he saved my world anyway. For on his site I found the MigRecover application and operator instructions.
Now many of the comments had indicated people had problems with MigRecover. As an optimist, and with nothing to lose – well, actually a lot to lose – I couldn't even begin to conceptualize trying to get all my license keys back from the software vendors – I set MigRecover off about its business on a 266 GB file. It took 14 hours to recover that file but all my documents came back, not only my all important .pst file with all my license keys, but also all my application settings, Photoshop actions, presets, Expression Media catalogs. So while I'm still slowly going through the pain of reinstalling and then reapplying patches to my software, I don't have to go back and recreate everything. So I'm now up and running on CS5 and have just returned to shooting once more with an interior shoot, a dance recital shoot and a graduation shoot all over the last weekend.
Normalcy is slowly returning. Thank you, Michael Visser!
