SO I have an external hard drive, the puppy jumped onto the desk and it fell onto the floor with a responding crash. Every single photo in the last 3 years are on there. I have unplugged, replugged everything about 10 times.
Anyone know of anywhere that may be able to recover or rebuild 478 GB of photos?????
(Yes the dog being given away with a hefty large sum of money! )
I don't have anything to add on the list of advice to recover your photos. And I feel terrible for your loss. I am absolutely appalled though that no one has been concerned over your dog. The puppy was just being a puppy. They need to be be trained just like children. Would you have given away your child with a hefty sum of money just because they accidentally broke something of immense value to you? I have 5 dogs, and while they do occasionally destroy something, I would never get rid of them.
If the drive itself is functional (as opposed to the case), you could just plug it into something like this or this and retrieve the data. If not, the images are gone unless you spend thousands on a data recovery service.
I feel your pain. We lost a RAID 5 array (the enclosure controller went bad) AND the backup drive simultaneously yesterday. I managed to recover almost everything, but it was seriously stressful.
Hugs to you my friend.. That's just awful !!!!!! I only recently backed up all of my images onto disc's just in case something happened with my external drive.. It just seems like no matter what, it will never be enough though.. :-(...
Great info Lydia.. I was just thinking about that as I was typing this.. Hmmmmm... I think I know what I want for my birthday... :-)
Sorry, this suggestion is kinda late... but I always dredded that happening, so once a week, I burn a DVD of everything I added to my hard drive over the past week.. (or every couple weeks.... every time i hit about 4 gigs of files... about 1-2 weeks)
that way I have a safety backup incase everything gets fried... it's time sonsuming, and i have to store a binder with over 100 DVD's in it....
BUT it's a guaranteed backup... I reccomend that everyone do this...
Good luck retreiving the files! try doing this for next time to be safe...
To combat this in the future, I recommend what My Beloved (hubby) made me get... Carbonite.com
Backs up automatically. I don't do anything at all. $45 a year.
Actually Carbonite and most similar services only back up what is on your computer's internal hard drive. They do NOT back up external drives. So it would not have saved Juliet, nor will it save you if you've got all of your photos on an external drive (like many of us do).
Edited to correct spelling and to add: Carbonite is supposedly one of the better back up services, for those interested. But there are others as well.
the problem with online backup services, is that you're trusting someone else to store your stuff, and make sure it's able to actually be restored. What if their system failed. What if they go out of business, and then sell their equipment, what happens with your data? Too many variables. I don't think alot of them have it right, and I seem to remember someone here being upset with one of the services recently.
That being said, redundancy is the key.
I have my data in 3 places.
I have all of my shots including edits, on my internal drive. Every RAW and/or original file is on an external drive. I swap this drive out every month with a drive I keep at the office. This essentially gives me the ability to have what I desperately need recovered should even the worst happen.
The up-front cost is high, but the fact that I control all of my backups, know where the files are at all times, and know the data is restorable is as much a piece of mind as the backups themselves.
If you have any questions, feel free to PM me. I'm happy to help you decide which route to go.
As for your current predicament, most of the advice here are good suggestions. I'd be careful of condensation in the freezer, but it's worth a shot. If you want to go the data recovery route, call the manufacturer of the drive for suggestions. They often will have a solid company that they deal with and often have discounted services. If you need help, I'm sure there's a local computer tech shop that can help you out. I don't reccomend the store chains, but a good freelance shop is the way to go. I'd be happy to help, but I'm in the middle of the wrong continent to make it easy on you.
If the drive itself is functional (as opposed to the case), you could just plug it into something like this or this and retrieve the data. If not, the images are gone unless you spend thousands on a data recovery service.
I feel your pain. We lost a RAID 5 array (the enclosure controller went bad) AND the backup drive simultaneously yesterday. I managed to recover almost everything, but it was seriously stressful.
How did that happen?! Which RAID 5 array? Was it crappy luck that the backup drive went bad as well?
When investigating a backup system myself, I went with a Drobo. Upside is it is very simple to use and upgrade space. Downside is it's more expensive than many options and doesn't cover the problem of a single location like your house burning down.
DriveSavers has had a good reputation in the past, but are not cheap. You can call them toll-free and get an estimate. Check out their "Hall of Fame" and "Museum" sections -- maybe you'll feel better ... :-)
A thought - when you upgrade your computer, pull the old hard drives, reformat them, use them as separate backups, then send them to a relative. Cheap offsite storage if you trust your relatives. :-)
Good luck with recovering.
As long as the drive hasnt been corrupted it should be recoverable using another housing to slave the drive. I performed some miracles in my years on an IT helpdesk and earned the love of many of our employess by saving thier family photos (why on a work laptop I have no idea!!). I will keep my fingers crossed that its as easy as that & hopefully the service you find to do it will be cheap.
SO I have an external hard drive, the puppy jumped onto the desk and it fell onto the floor with a responding crash. Every single photo in the last 3 years are on there.
I feel your pain and bet most people reading this probably realize the same thing could happen to them at this very instant and that they would be in the same predicament as you.
This problem becomes much more acute as we accumulate more and more pictures. I have many 10s of thousands of photographs that I probably have years worth of post processing invested into and losing that data is simply not an option for me.
Being an old school type computer programmer I use a relatively inexpensive, simplistic manual approach which includes off-site storage to prevent picture data loss. It mimics the same method used at large mainframe computer sites for disaster recovery.
Like Scalvert I have a RAID-5 array. However, for me RAID-5 is only to speed up my system input/output and allow me to continue functioning uninterrupted if one of the disks goes bad. But I do NOT consider it backup.
I distrust solutions like Carbonite but they might actually be best now, especially since Internet speeds are so much faster today than they used to be. But I just don't like to much background Internet activity going on that might slow me down. Time is money!
There are probably more elegant solutions, but this is my solution...
1-I bought two fast external disk drives.
I got two off-the-shelf external 1 terabyte eSATA drives costing $120 each. Each one is big enough to hold all my photographs. If you have half a terabyte of images like JulietNN then eSATA connected drives is about the only way you can backup all your files in a reasonable time. USB and firewire are simply to slow. I can back mine up in a couple hours or so and I have more than half a terabyte. I don't use any automation and perform manual updates every few weeks or after more frequent vigorous activity as needed.
2-For backup I manually copy all my photos to both drives - a complete set on each drive.
A-Copy one set to the local drive
B-Take the new backup to my off-site storage and swap it with the one I keep there.
C-Bring that drive back and copy the current files to it.
This means that I have a complete set of working files on my workstation, one complete backup set on a local external hard drive and one mirrored backup set on an external hard drive stored off-site.
I use Lightroom II as my photo organization and management tool and its catalog files are included in my backups.
In other words, I can simply plug my backup disk(s) as is into ANY Windows computer to be immediately functional in Lightroom and never skip a beat even if the house gets blown up in a terrorist attack.
Not to sidetrack the thread, but for those of you who keep an identical copy of your pictures on another drive, the fastest and easiest way of doing this is rsync on a Mac and Robocopy on a PC, both of which are free, and in the Mac case already installed as part of the OS. I think you get Robocopy as part of the Windows Server Resource kit, which is a free download at Mircosoft (don't quote me on that).
Both these utilities will only copy the difference in a directory structure, meaning you can just tell it to copy the entire folder into the backup location and it will actually only copy the changes. It's way quicker than backing up the whole lot every time or using file manager / finder to manually make copies. If for example you have a 200G folder of pictures, but you've only changed about 150Mb of them, it will only copy the changes and save you a whole load of time!
I've found on the Mac if you let Aperture manage your library, rsync looks inside the library package and again only copies the difference, something that time machine previously wasn't able to do (this may be resolved in Snow Leopard, I haven't tried yet).
If you want to see how to use either, run "robocopy /???" or "man rsync". The rsync manual is a typical Unix manual page, so if you don't want to decipher it here's the command for making an exact replica
rsycn -avu
the -v switch isn't necessary as it stands for 'verbose' and will just give you a lot more info on what's going on. The u switch will not update anything on the destination that's newer (just in case you saved something in the backup instead of the original folder).
For robocopy it is:
robocopy /MIR
With robocopy using the /MIR switch will overwrite anything on the destination even if it's newer. If you want to avoid this then use /S /E instead.
Hope all this helps some of you with a backup strategy!
I am in IT an can tell you a fire will kill all of your data, offsite is the only way to keep it safe. I have lost due to HDD failure but only lost a month of data...and was able to recover a lot of that.
I have a 1tb hd to USE my images, all photos are in 4gb directory like
Disk 01
Disk 02
Disk 03
....
Disk 151
Disk 152
and I have a backup of each directory on a DVD and a second backup DVD that I sent to Arizona to my dad.
If I have a fire in my home, I will not loose my children's Childhood. Everything works great for YEARS and then you WILL have an issue like this. It is normal and the best thing about your issue is that you will show countless people on this site that they should be very afraid. If it is as bad as we fear, NEVER let yourself get in this position. The reason I have all the redundancy is because I have lost MANY harddrives over years. I too have lost LOTS of data and choose very carefully what to backup. I probably lost about 15 hard drives over the years. I had one machine with 7 Hard drives. I also had 5 machines with 3-4 hard drives each. When a harddrive was 21.4 meg it was common to have more than one.
BACKUP and Get a Second offsite. If a HDD sits for years it may not work.
Backup on DVD and reburn a new copy ever 5-8 years or the DVD will go bad. Having other copies is the ONLY thing that will save you. Every storage is temporary....
And don't bring up Tape drive as I lost more data with that than any HDD failures I ever had. I only trust a DVD, HDD and tape as far as I can throw it!
My Memory's will stay with me, I will always FIGHT to make sure of it, and 8 years of consistency of equipment will not let my guard down....will you ever again?
I am truly sorry, Next time I will not be if you do not learn the big lesson from this!
If the drive itself is functional (as opposed to the case), you could just plug it into something like this or this and retrieve the data. If not, the images are gone unless you spend thousands on a data recovery service.
I feel your pain. We lost a RAID 5 array (the enclosure controller went bad) AND the backup drive simultaneously yesterday. I managed to recover almost everything, but it was seriously stressful.
How did that happen?! Which RAID 5 array? Was it crappy luck that the backup drive went bad as well?
There are raid arrays that plug into networks. I stay away from those as my company had one for 1 month and then the mainboard went, I still backed it up and had a backup on friday, failed on saturday and they said that I had to send the unit back for a mainboard change and they "WERE NOT RESPOSIBLE FOR DATA" and would "REPLACE THE HDDS".... with all the company secrets. The President of the company came to me and had steam coming out of his ears. MY BOSS TOLD ME NOT TO BACK UP THE DATA BECAUSE IT WAS SAFE! You should of seen the look on their face what I threw it in their face. I was ballsy and said " I do not care what anyone tells me, boss or president... You hired me for my for protecting your computer systems and I do not care about any piece of crap in here....DATA is SAFE and backed up. I will always do my job". Boss kept his job but was not happy with my answer. After a very short talk he agreed that we both had our jobs because I was going to do the right thing. He had a hdd failure in his desktop pc a week later.... His pc was backed up thru the network that I setup even tho he did not want it and I told him every machine would be backed up thru the network or with a second drive. NEVER had any issues after that.
NEVER trust any device. RAID IS GREAT but I will say it again. NEVER trust any device.
I since lost another Proliant with raid due to 2 HDD failures...but lost a few days there :(
Oh, if your only using 2 HDDS and have them bolth plugged in and have a massive power spike and blow both drive..... (anything is possible and I lost lots of HDD's) Burn holes and get it offsite. PLEASE BE SAFE, everyone will have a different answer, BE SAFE!
