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Hard Drive Data Recovery

I use an 8 gig card in my camera, commonly it is half full after a lightning run, last night was an all time high of 6 gigs. A backup drive or two is the only real good option at this time I think but thats a good idea for the best of the best that you cannot afford to lose..
 
I could probably cut my hard drive usage for stills by a factor of 20 if I just went through and deleted the useless shots. Right now I'm too afraid to go on a major 'delete-fest' for fear of accidentally wiping out something good (it's happened before). So, I'm just backing everything up.
 
Dan Robinson said:
I could probably cut my hard drive usage for stills by a factor of 20 if I just went through and deleted the useless shots. Right now I'm too afraid to go on a major 'delete-fest' for fear of accidentally wiping out something good (it's happened before). So, I'm just backing everything up.
Click to expand...

I'm the same way. In addition, I keep the RAWs, the processed TIFFs, and the web-sized JPGs just in case. I hate to dump the processed TIFFs given the amount of time that goes into processing RAW images, and I don't want to dump the RAWs for obvious reasons. The result? An awful lot of hard drive space dedicated to different files for the same image. Ah well, at least HDDs are getting cheaper by the month. 2TB drives here we come!
 
Are you absolutely certain that you setup the drive correctly to be a slave? Did you change the jumper correctly? Also, some drives have to be physically located in the correct position on the IDE chain to work, unless it has a "Cable Select" feature. If freezing didn't work, try flipping the drive into different positions (upside down, sideways, etc) to see if it will fire up. Also, you can try gently smacking the drive to try and dislodge the bearings (that's probably what is fried).

If the drive is physically failing, that can keep the computer from booting up correctly. The BIOS is probably failing to see the drive, and the bootup process is failing there.

For Backups, I periodically burn two DVD copies of my RAW images. I try to keep these stored at work as well. I also have redundant hard drives spread across two machines. One thing I've been thinking of doing is using SmugVault, a new feature that Smugmug (my picture host) is selling. The pricing scheme is kind of weird (http://www.smugmug.com/price/smugvault.mg), but it would be nice for storing some of my best RAW stuff. I don't know yet.

James
 
You may want to consider keeping the mirror drive out of the machine, to eliminate the risk from co-location (e.g., power surge, the computer falling over, or other things that could knock out both drives simultaneously). Right now I use a portable 1 TB Firewire drive that's stored elsewhere in the house. This makes it extra convenient if I have to evacuate the house for some reason. I also keep a secondary backup at a relative's house and update it every few months.

I've looked at RAID options, but there's that co-location issue.. one thing I might try is putting the redundant drive in another computer on my network and see if there's some software that will mirror the drive over the LAN.

Tim
 
There is a great free Windows utility called robocopy. It is included standard now with Vista and Server 2003. You can get it for XP as part of the Windows Resource Kit: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en

This is a command driven tool that runs in DOS. It is fairly simple, and very robust. Check out the wiki for details on using it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy

Assuming you are Admin on both machines, you could setup a .bat file with something like this, and schedule it to run nightly or whatever through Scheduled Tasks. I use this a lot at work to make backups over our WAN:

robocopy "\\sourcecomp\c$\pictures" "\\destcomp\c$\backuppictures" * /NP /E /NFL >> c:\log.txt 2>> c:\err.txt

You can also use the /MIR flag, but that will delete files in the destination directory that don't exist in the source.

James
 
I just picked up two Western Digital 1TB externals on sale at Circuit City for $198 each.
 
sorry to hear that but it was worth a try.....definately something i would have tried:)
 
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