A lesson to all...back your chit up

[timmyquest]

It would apear as though i lost 99% of my digital photographs (as well as 20 gigs of music). This was on a seperate 220gig hard drive. All i had on this hard drive was music, photographs, and software/drivers/plugins etc that i've downloaded.

I cant tell if it's a hard drive failure, or a virus...although my hard drive has made no noise and a virus scan has found nothing.

I used recovery software...it enabled me to recover the 1% of what wasnt already lost. :rolleyes:

I kept telling myself i needed to get my stuff on CD's. Problem is i had CD's and at least 80 gigs of photographs to copy. So i kept telling myself i'd get it done when i bought a DVD burner.

I've worked with and owned computers for 7 years and have never had a hard drive fail me and never lost anything like this.

At least i still have 800 pixle sized images on the web...i guess :(

[Raj]

Thats very sad .....
Actually I was thinking of getting a dedicated (separate) hard drive for photos/music/movies as compared to burning DVD's for pics, but your experience has given me serious doubts :-(

[timmyquest]

Thats very sad .....
Actually I was thinking of getting a dedicated (separate) hard drive for photos/music/movies as compared to burning DVD's for pics, but your experience has given me serious doubts :-(

This is part of the reason i procrastinated. My logic was, if the drive is only to be used for storage...i dunno, it seems safer.

It's stupid though, i'm a firm believer in that a hard copy is the only copy, and CD/DVD is a copy that can not fault unless you fault it yourself.

[Bodog]

That's a bummer, timmy. :cry: But you know the saying: It's not if it will fail, but when... The only thing I keep on my hard drive are the most recent RAWs I'm still sorting and jpegs for the last year of so. The original RAWs are all burned to CD and (more recently) DVD. I realize even that is not 100% safe, but the odds are in my favor. ACDSee has them all catalogued with thumbnails (25,000+)! So keeping track is no problem

You might look at something like Steve Gibson's Spinrite. If there is any chance the drive can be salvaged, Spinrite will do it. Not sure if there is a free trial though. Good luck. :)

[kawter2]

It would apear as though i lost 99% of my ...20 gigs of music).


did you pay full price for this music? :) :) :) :)

[Raj]

Yeah, I have a viao P4, my friend & me purchased same model last year. His hard dive expired just 6 days prior to warranty deadline. he was lucky enough but this kind of failures raise serious doubts on branded products too ! Worst since a lot of branded companies have moved their manufacturing units to China ...

[Sketcher]

Thanks for the SpinRite reference Bodog. I've been a Gibson fan for years, had forgotten that I wanted to get a copy of SpinRite for the office before I actually needed it.

Sorry about your Data loss Tim.

SpinRite
Knoppix STD
Freezer method

Hopefully there's something there that can help you turn back time.

[timmyquest]

i watched the supplied video from tech TV..$89 is worth it...i'm gonna give it a whirl, thanks for the advice

[timmyquest]

did you pay full price for this music? :) :) :) :)

*ehem*

...umm...uhh...

Actually most of it came from a milk crate full of CD's that my girlfriends brother had.

[cmM]

wow... sorry to hear that, it really sucks.
I've gone the other route and I have a stack of DVDs full of pictures sitting on my shelf. (I also keep them on my HDD for a certain amount of time).

[chris.bailey]

Thats a bummer and no mistake. My wife thinks I am mad backing up to another hard drive and DVD's but this shows why.

Dont know about the US but in the UK there are a lot of data recovery experts. I had a Raid 5 go down (double disk failure and no tape in the DAT, doh!) at work and a company I used recovered all but one file.

[tim]

That sucks Timmy. If I were you i'd look into getting a professional to have a look - 80GB of photos is a huge amount, i'd hate to lose mine.

My backup scheme is just short of paranoia. All my photos are on my primary hard drive, and I synchronise that with a portable drive weekly. I copy the photos from the portable drive to my work machine every couple of weeks, and every couple of months I write them to DVD and mail them to my parents.

To anyone implementing a backup scheme, make sure you have offsite backups, in case of fire or theft having images on two drives in the same machine won't help you at all. Also, as we've unfortunately seen here, if the hard drives are connected to a machine a virus could wipe out every copy of every picture you have, no matter what drive it's on.

[neil_r]

That really sucks…..

Backing up to DVD is a real pain but less of a pain than loosing pictures.

The price of hard drives is so low now that I have bought a couple of 300Gb external drives which I back up to regularly, and yes I also back up to DVD for the really special shoots.

N

[BearSummer]

Hi Timmy,

that really sucks, very sorry to hear that. If it is a hard drive failure then your data is still on the disk, you just need someone to crack open the drive, remount the platter in a new drive and read it. By "just" i mean that you get a pro to recover your data for you. If it was a virus then you may be screwed but it wont cost you anything to send a data recovery company a "what would you suggest" email.

We used to back up to CD, trouble is that cd's and dvd's only seem to last for about 10 years, so after 6-8 years of shooting we were starting to see problems with our earliest disks. My wife had a major panic when several early cd's (and some of the later ones burnt at high speed) reported unreadable errors. The solution was to buy a couple of 500Gb lacie drives and back up to them, using one as a mirror of the other. We periodically backup the new stuff to dvd but our main data store is on the lacies. If one goes down then we order another immediately, when they are full we buy a 1Tb lacie and just carry on as before. I can see a time in the not to distant future when we are going to have to go RAID but not just yet.

Hope you get your files back.

Best wishes

BearSummer

[Mills]

Ouch!

[JZaun]

Yep thats tough to handle. See the below thread where I lost some back up but had a couple more. "you can't have too much backup" Just maybe you can find some recovery software that will work for you.
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=59594
good luck
JZ

[timmyquest]

spinrite has been running on my PC for about 8 hours, says its still got a few to go.

I'm not to worried, if i lost them it wsa a lesson learned, if i get them back all the better.

Pro's can cost...ALOT of cash. I'd rather spend that on lenses so i can rebuild a collection of good photographs then spend it on the recovery of a collection of medicore photographs :-(

The only positive that i'm looking at is that this was, essentially, my first year of photography, so the truth is that the majority of the photographsw ere crap.

And the ones that wernt, i have printed...those should last 90 more years :rolleyes:

[Jon]

That was the prompt I needed to catch up my photo backups. I need that set of CDs/DVDs left at the office.
Current strategy:
1 set on laptop (as long as hard drive capacities keep going up, I'm OK. I'll just use the old ones for USB 2 externals)
Home computer - 2 sets on separate hard drives.
NetDisk has another set
CD/DVD backups at home and office.

Now as for the stuff back when I was using film . . .
What's anyone think about the Nikon Coolscan 5000 (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=productlist&A=details&Q=&sku=310477&is=REG) with stack loader? I can't see individually feeding several tens (at least) of thousands of slides one at a time.

[timmyquest]

I need to go shoot some landscapes WITH FILM for my photography class...perfect, 4 hours 'till work...i have my recently purchased 17-40...this could be fun.

It's just so sunny out...so sunny...now where did i put that lens hood

:evil:.... :rolleyes: when it rains it pours....

[cactusclay]

Sorry to hear that Timmy.

[tim]

Timmy, perhaps you should start deleting photos that aren't "keepers", that'll keep your backup sizes down. I immediately delete out of focus shots, but I usually keep my ok shots. One day when I get time i'll go back and delete all the ok shots, i'll keep only the best 10% probably, unless what i'm taking photos of is important to me, or was done for someone else.

[Avalonthas]

If you said u tryed virus scanning but didnt find anything then that means ur harddrive didnt fail as u had to access the virus scan program off the harddrive in order to scan it. Could be a potential virus, but definitly not a failure. Unless u ran the scan from another drive?

[Avalonthas]

Thats why u should always back up ur stuff lol. Heavy lesson to learn, but atleast now u will do it the right way. It might be a pain but its worth the cost.

[timmyquest]

If you said u tryed virus scanning but didnt find anything then that means ur harddrive didnt fail as u had to access the virus scan program off the harddrive in order to scan it. Could be a potential virus, but definitly not a failure. Unless u ran the scan from another drive?

I have two hard drives in my computer, the hard drive with my photos and stuff is not a bootable drive. Windows is on the other drive, my programs are installed on a seperate partition on that other drive.

[Toogy]

Wow, sorry to hear about your loss of data...
...
Burning DVD's as I type this!
Thanks for the reminder!

[XXWoodmanXX]

Man'o'man. :(

I just put the first-of-many DVD-Rs in the burner now. At least you can say that you helped others from this unforunate tragedy :)

[pcasciola]

That really sucks…..

Backing up to DVD is a real pain but less of a pain than loosing pictures.

The price of hard drives is so low now that I have bought a couple of 300Gb external drives which I back up to regularly, and yes I also back up to DVD for the really special shoots.

NI'll second the hard drive idea for sure. I have more 200Gb and larger hard drives now than I have CF cards, many of them in external cases. They are getting so cheap now it's insane. CompUSA had a sale today, $40 after rebate for a 160 Gb drive. Throw a $30 external USB 2.0 case around that, and for $70 you have 160Gb of external, transportable backup storage. Compare that to a stack of 30-40 DVDs.

My favorite backup device though is a 60Gb notebook drive that I keep in a super slim USB 2.0 case. Fits in my shirt pocket and is under $100 now.

[tim]

I want to say again, offsite or at least offline backups are a good idea. Offline backups prevent against data loss by a virus or accidental deletion, offsite backups prevent against theft and fire.

[Citizensmith]

Getting a DVD burner is no major thing any longer. $60 on a 16x DL burner at the egg.

My current set up is keeping the 'in use' photo folder under 15Gb and that is mirrored on two separate HDD in my photography computer. I also burn everything to 2 DVDs stored in separate places. I do this whenever I've got about 4Gb of un backed up photos, or whenever I've done some paid for work. Lastly, I don't go online with my photography computer, and it has no open shares. Any web surfing, gaming and such is done on a different 'expendable' computer.

All that being said, good luck getting your stuff back. Its an easy and common mistake to make, and everyone probably does something like it sooner or later. I guess my version was loosing a computer when lighting struck a local transformer. I'd been meaning to get it on a UPS for a while, just hadn't got round to picking one up so it was straight in the wall.

[chucksberg]

timmyquest, did you get your data back?

[ChristopherMartin]

I learned sort of that way also timmyquest. I had my entire computer crash once after putting over 200 unbacked up photo's on it. Now it was nowhere close to the loss of yours though, it still hurts deeply. Since then I back up my photo's religiously on to CD-R and I always make two copies just incase one of the CD-R was corrupted I'll have a back up. It's a pain in the butt to back them up but it sure is better then losing them forever.

I wont use a back up HD because they are too easy to lose all the info, a CD works best for me. So if you haven't already, start backing up your photo's ASAP. Take from anyone who ever lost their work, it sucks, absolutely sucks and its like being punched in the heart. No fun at all.

[ChristopherMartin]

Oh yeah and it is also a good idea to backup your photo's and have one back up at a bank or a trusted friends house. That way if your home catches fire, you wont lose everything in it. And hopefully you'll never need them.

[OceanRider]

yup had it haapen to me too, lost all my kids pictures and videos of them being young...was "going to burn them some day" now I burn on regular basis. Got to get DVD burner however to make it faster and cleaner. I have saved the hard drive however to get one of those speciality guys give it wack....they charge min 500.00 but some day when my ship comes in I will try and recover them, there there we just got to find em!

Cheers

[karusel]

The only positive that i'm looking at is that this was, essentially, my first year of photography, so the truth is that the majority of the photographsw ere crap.

This was so honest though I'm sure exaggerated, it made me giggle... Yeah, what if you had a 5 year worth of photos with some topnotch captured moments? If it happened to me, it would kill me, really.

Thanx for a reminder; in monday I'll buy another HDD.

I've already got two, but they're getting old, since the computer is on 24/7 and I realize it's just a matter of time. I never trusted floppy disks, even when copying files to a neighbor, I usually copied two of the same files on the disk, or on two disks - VERY often there were bad sectors and computer could not copy.

As for CD's, I don't trust them at all... I've witnessed quite a few that suddenly became unreadable, and upon closer inspection, the data layer had cracks and was coming off... Since I don't own a DVD-R yet, I'm unsure of reliability of DVDs, but I place my bet on HDDs, safetywise.

I've had 2 hard drives die on me, 1 was 50 MB Quantum, I think it was because of some wire shortcut of some sort, the other 420 MB, virus, can't remember which one, but the drive could not have been cured, and trust me, I used to be an expert in DOS.

Don't ever trust computers, ever. Tim is absolutely correct and not the least bit paranoid. Back-up the backup. Then you'll be safe - probably.