Another idiot = me [Archive] - Canon Digital Photography Forums

mttmrphy

22nd of March 2004 (Mon), 22:25

Last weekend I formatted my pc hardrive (can you see where this is going?)

I do have an external drive that I use to back up important documents and PHOTOS. Now, I could of sworn I moved my photograph folder over.... but I didn't. ALL IS LOST.

No wedding photos or professional portfolios were lost so my life isn't over, but I did lose vacation pictures and a lot of photos that I really liked. I don't like burning pictures to disc either because I would lose them for sure.

My question is, do any of you have advice for idiot proofing my photos? I plan on taking 1000's in the future and I do not want this to EVER happen again. How can I keep them all straight and safe from myself?

tpinchback

22nd of March 2004 (Mon), 23:12

Buy a big cd case. Label it PHOTOS. Put it some where it will not be lost, and burn two copies onto a cd or dvd.

Keep one at home and the other somewhere else.... like, Work or at your mom and dads or where ever.

Sorry about your lose :cry: :cry:

This reminds me to backup my pics :D :shock:

angrybunny

22nd of March 2004 (Mon), 23:22

I formatted my HD last month and forgot to backup 7 years worth of archived email. I don't know how I would react if I lost even a small portion of my photos.

My solution? I bought a now inexpensive DVD Burner. (~$100). A single disk can hold up to 4.7 GB of data. You can burn a new disk every few weeks or so, and each blank media will cost less than $2 each. You still have to archive the photos, but 700 MB doesn't hold much these days.

mttmrphy

22nd of March 2004 (Mon), 23:35

Canon 300D = $1,000.00
Lenses and accessories = $2,000.00
DVD Burner with media = $200.00

Not deleting pictures of ducks = Priceless

Thanks guys... dvd burner, here I come. My credit card company will send me a birthday card this year.

theflyingkiwi

22nd of March 2004 (Mon), 23:51

what I have done in regards to my hdd is the following, created a partion for the c: drive where all the applications live. made it nice and big so I wont run out of room any time soon

where I do run out off room is the location of the data that I have collected over the years.

e-mail archive is simple, I use outlook, I created a outlook archive on a different disk and archive everything.

create a backup of my fav's so that when I do reinstall everything, I have a back up of that as well.

All the above information is either stored on my d: or my e: drive. which I never format.

I also back up my pictures to a USB HDD, and the HDD sitting on my laptop.

so when I get to format my c: drive, I know that I am 99.9% safe. I have everything backuped so I won't lose it.

Mark

joeseph

23rd of March 2004 (Tue), 01:26

There isn't really any completely foolproof storage, but I can possibly offer a ray of sunshine for recovering photo's - all may not be yet lost.
step 1 is DO NOT do anything more on the drive!
2, go to www.convar.com and download their PC Inspector recovery software and have a try at recovering the photo's. This software seems to be able to search for & copy to another drive, deleted .jpg files

there's lots of other software out there that claims to do the same but personally I've only used this one and Digital-Image-Recovery successfully on flashcards, there shouldn't be much difference with using it on a hard-drive.

good Luck!

(says the guy who destroyed the partition table on a 80Gb drive last year and spent weeks getting 2 years worth of photo's back!)

samdring

23rd of March 2004 (Tue), 13:46

Last weekend I formatted my pc hardrive (can you see where this is going?)

I do have an external drive that I use to back up important documents and PHOTOS. My question is, do any of you have advice for idiot proofing my photos? I plan on taking 1000's in the future and I do not want this to EVER happen again. How can I keep them all straight and safe from myself?

With an external hard drive which you have, Drive Image (from Powerquest) is great in that not only can you automate images (I have it set for weekly for most partitions and daily for image of images) but you have the options of restoring full images or individual files - set and forget!

Sorry about the confusion twixt images and images!

mttmrphy

23rd of March 2004 (Tue), 13:54

Well, the DVD burner is ordered and on its way. When I get home from work I will try any run a recovery program.

After re-installing windows, I installed all of my programs and then ran the clean up utility to remove all of the temp files. I know its not looking good but if I can at least salvage some pictures from my trip to Vegas, my wife might let me sleep in the same room again.

dpanicc1

23rd of March 2004 (Tue), 14:26

Don't know how far you've gone since reformatting, but reformatting doesn't necessarily blow everything away. There's a $600.00 trialware version from Ontrack.com that will search the drive and tell you exactly what can be recovered. If it finds your stuff, they will want you to buy their software. You can then search for other versions like getdataback that will probably do the trick for <$50.00. If you've since reinstalled Windows on the drive and you're using the drive, chances are some of the data is overwritten, but some may still be recovered. I am a systems administrator for a couple of FTP sites and we lost a drive; I was able to recover some of the data even after the drive failed and was not recogized by system. Download either getbackdata or ontract's trial version and check it out. Your chances are best though if you didn't re-install and begin using the drive.

Which reminds me, according to getdataback's website, you can recover files off of CF cards (not sure about solidstate) with their software.

robvonk

23rd of March 2004 (Tue), 16:04

There are some freeware apps that do the same. No need to spend 600 I posted some links on this forum to it.

You don't want to boot from that drive anyway. Get a CDrom OS (knoppix (linux) or bartPE (Windows)) to boot from CD.

Rob

CyberDyneSystems

23rd of March 2004 (Tue), 18:47

If you have not used the drive to reinstall anything,. you need to try "GetDataBack"

It is amazing! If all you did was format once,. I would bet money that it will get all your pics back.

Really. Try it,. you can download the software and run it for free,. and it will tell you exactly what it can and can't restore,.

At that point you can decide to buy it (I think it was $45.00)

You've nothing to loose.

cgratti

23rd of March 2004 (Tue), 19:17

Sendide

23rd of March 2004 (Tue), 20:09

There is always a way tol recover folders from your HD, even after having formatted it. if you have any friend good in computer stuff ...., believe me, you can recover your files or at least most of them. the more you fill your drive back , the more difficult it'll be to recover deleted ones or ones lost after formating
regards
Khalid

PaulTopol

24th of March 2004 (Wed), 03:03

Can suggest 2 sites for recovery programs:

Recovermyfiles.com

Restorer2000.com

Decided to reinstall winxp; backed up onto external HD via firewire. Worked really well. :twisted: BUT left External HD connected when I reformatted what I thought was my C drive...DUMB!!!!!
:oops:
These programs worked like a charm. Took LOTS of time..but that's computers for you.

Paul

karusel

24th of March 2004 (Wed), 04:42

For future storage I suggest you pick something from Iomega (http://www.iomega.com).

ron chappel

24th of March 2004 (Wed), 05:48

There's only one thing for it.You'll havr to go out and get those holiday photo's again :D :D

chris.bailey

24th of March 2004 (Wed), 06:21

Get ready to go into backup overload as I did when I lost a lot.

One of the reasons I stick to using 512mb cards is that I copy pictures across onto my photos drive and then date up a CD and wirite and finalise the same ones to that. I always then have a backup of that days pictures as RAW images. i.e. I have a copy of the negatives.

My Photos drive, which is on a RAID is then backed up using drive image to another drive AND for good measure I keep a DVD backup of a months pictures PLUS I keep a backup of most of it on my work pc and that in turn is backed up onto the corporate tape library. I reckon even I couldnt be that unlucky next time.