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The surreal sensation of dataloss....
13 years ago
First things first. I back up my data. Regularly. On a separate drive for the purpose. I also make offline backups every six months or so.
The chances of loosing your backup and originals within days of each other are slim. The chances of both failing so suddenly and completely that there's no way to salvage stuff even slimmer.
But that's, more or less, what happened.
So, what I have is my offline backups. I made plenty of those. Faaar far too many.
Its chaos. I don't know what i have and what I don't. Files that i think contain finished characters are in fact only the initial stages of building. Things id forgotten id even done are there in pristine detail. There's thousands of files and versions of files to go through.
So, in the interests of my sanity, its probably best to draw a line under things and start some new stuff. The old stuff may still be there, but its going to take some tidying. After all, whats the hurry?
The chances of loosing your backup and originals within days of each other are slim. The chances of both failing so suddenly and completely that there's no way to salvage stuff even slimmer.
But that's, more or less, what happened.
So, what I have is my offline backups. I made plenty of those. Faaar far too many.
Its chaos. I don't know what i have and what I don't. Files that i think contain finished characters are in fact only the initial stages of building. Things id forgotten id even done are there in pristine detail. There's thousands of files and versions of files to go through.
So, in the interests of my sanity, its probably best to draw a line under things and start some new stuff. The old stuff may still be there, but its going to take some tidying. After all, whats the hurry?
chkdsk h: /f
oxo
put it in a new USB to SaTa tin, or connect the drive to a new system, and see if it reads from another system.
Then, connect the drive to a Windows 7 machine, and use those commands above, where the g: or h: is your drive letter.
~Kiyote!
oxo scream if you need help.
But many things have already been tried, down to a low level statistical analysis by SpinRite 6. The options left involve opening up the drives and getting at the platters.
gives you 50 free GIGS for free.
Just a heads up, on where to store your data, for cloud storage.
You have to sign up, and pick a passwords that features both upper and lowercase text in it.
LikEthiS4401
oxo something like that, but you know, to your liking.
Sorry you lost your data.
It feels like part of you died.
It's so scary, I hate it.
Also, apparently, i shouldn't of used such aggressive data reclamation software, as that might of damaged any data that was there.
And I should put my hard drives in the freezer. Or somewhere warm.
What Im going to start doing is to archive projects to USB stick and cloud storage, as well as actually backing up the machine and dumping the projects directory.
And after all, i AM a weasel, would you trust ME with data? =OP
But yeah, echoing all of this: orthogonal backups wherever possible. Different media, different location where possible.I bought a BD-R drive specifically so i could back up 25GB at a time because 8GB wasn't cutting it. If i hadn't got lazy with backups (partly due to the media itself not being cheap) my HD firmware fritz would have been much less evil.
BTW in case your backup drive or your master drive is a Seagate and it's still spinning up but not being recognised by whatever it's plugged into, there's a particular series of Seagate drives which are affected by a firmware bug that makes them just stop working one day. If that's the case, Seagate tech support are worth talking to - when my music drive went tits up they reflashed the firmware and everything just started working again.
Hope there's a happy ending in store for you too. I know that surreal feeling from first-hand experience and i wouldn't wish it on anyone.