I Am Such A Loser

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 3:09 pm

I have ruined 1 years worth of my life by putting all of my SFP dev.'s and pre.'s on a stupid wireless USB HDD. I didn't know that it had a battery failure that erased everything. Am I up shit creek w/o a paddle? Hopefully I can just reprogram everything and have all my files and folders right this time by doing a re install. Is this wise as I have screwed up everything, and am very nervous 4 I am in the middle of 2 pre production rehersals a day. Please tell me that life isn't over.

petal · Post by **petal** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 3:41 pm

That sounds weird!?
Is it a physical HDD or a RAM-storagedevice? If it's a physical HDD there should be a chance to recover all you files, but it might cost you some money.

Have you checked on the net how other users of the same device has handled the situation?

Anyways - I'm sorry to hear about your loss. I hope you figure it out.

Post by **hubird** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 4:06 pm

if you didn't really 'erase' everything by command, it should be repairable.
Probably only the file structure defining 'anchors' are damaged.
Use harddisk repair software to check the disk, and run the repair tools

On mac I use Disk Warrior, these kind of programs are really powerfull

Even if you erase everything by command and don't save anything new to that disk, everything can be recovered, as only the 'anchors' of the files are erased.
Only 'disk normalizing' can't be repaired, as it actual replaces all data and empty space by zeros and ones (that's why it takes much time).
So don't give up too fast :-0

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: hubird on 2006-08-08 17:14 ]</font>

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 4:58 pm

I will try this, as I spent months on these pres, and files. It is a wireless, USB HDD which I had sent to me from Kyoto. You plug the pigtail in the USB port, and Viola. It holds 20GB on a 2.5" disc that fits in your shirt pocket, very small, and very unreliable. But I am installing Black Box II, and once I got my folders screwed up, I just threw gas on the fire and probably screwed it up worse. But since it is not RAM based I will try to restore the data. Thanks 4 your replies.

bassdude · Post by **bassdude** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 5:20 pm

Very unusual that a hardisk would erase itself??!!

Try PC Inspector to recover deleted files once you are able to connect the drive. Its free.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: bassdude on 2006-08-08 18:20 ]</font>

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 6:19 pm

I am a real loser now 4 freaking out so fast. A battery shuts down the drive to protect the data, showing an empty image till replaced. So much 4 new toys. It's too late to go to the store, I will fix this in the morning just in time 4 rehersal. Sorry I am so green with computers. I need to study this more, but I have so much on my pallette, I find it convenient to put things off, Thanks 4 your rapid replies, as this forum is the best customer support I have ever seen period, and all 3rd party developers. I will now take the rounds out of my pistol. Also my producer/friend said why didn't you store it on your Giga drive?....DaHH!

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 6:56 pm

Also, why aren't you keeping backup of all essential files/drives when using the system daily for live performances?

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 7:28 pm

I had a transformative experience earlier this year. I wanted to repartition my main hard disk (with all of my important data on it). So I backed it all up to my 2nd hard disk. Then I formatted and repartitioned my main disk. Lastly, I commenced the restore, and almost immediately the 2nd hard disk fried itself. My main disk was erased, and the only backup was fried.

End. Of. The. World.

I was fortunate- I went to a data recovery service and paid a bunch of money to recover the data - they were able to do it by replacing some of the fried circuitry on the HD and restoring onto a new disk.

If they had not been able to recover the data (like if the heads had crashed onto the platters and physically destroyed the media), I would have lost every picture of my daughters, all my financial data, all kinds of planetz stuff, email history, all my documents, all my music, etc, etc, etc. It would have been unbelievably bad.

The thing I had failed to notice was that for a minute there (after repartitioning/formatting my main disk), there was only a single copy of my data in the world, sitting on this fragile piece of machinery with these unbelievably complex micromotorized magnetic heads and spinning platters of unbelievably dense magnetized metals, etc.

It's so easy when working with our machines to become too complacennt, and too accustomed to it all just working. Then when a failure occurs, we're actually surprised.

On the contrary, the fact that any of this stuff works at all is quite miraculous when you think about it!

I now have two external USB disks big enough to backup all my data. I backup with Retrospect as often as I reasonably can. I rotate one of the disks offsite, weekly.

This has been a very eye-opening experience for me, and I share it with everyone I can.

If you're not backing up your data, and making sure that there's always more than one reasonably recent copy of your important data in a safe place, then you should be *expecting* a disaster

Cheers,
-John

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 8:00 pm

Brotha Man John,
Your words of wisdom are so right. I am always in a rush to do many things, although I usually sucseed, from now on I will save to an offline storage device everytime. I just learned that I could store by hotswapping drives, or even save to my giga drive w/o having any effect. I am just so glad to retrieve this tomorrow, as I need to get to work with Black Box II, and all of it's splender. Good luck with the Oasys modeling and R & D in general.

Post by **hubird** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 8:04 pm

end good all good

Post by **garyb** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 9:44 pm

yep, glad it's sorted.

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Wed Aug 09, 2006 1:19 am

On 2006-08-08 20:28, John Cooper wrote:
The thing I had failed to notice was that for a minute there (after repartitioning/formatting my main disk), there was only a single copy of my data in the world, sitting on this fragile piece of machinery with these unbelievably complex micromotorized magnetic heads and spinning platters of unbelievably dense magnetized metals, etc.

and of course, you'll see that this is always the exact moment that equipment tends to break down!

I don't have a very well-structured backup system myself, but I do have copies of all important files on my second harddisk and I'll burn a dvd of some stuff once in a while, so even if it might not be all up-to-date exactly I'll always have something to fall back on.

MCCY · Post by **MCCY** » Wed Aug 09, 2006 3:00 am

I once lost 3 (three !!!) external harddrives in two weeks. Always after working 4 whole days to rebuild the data on it. It was at the beginning of my actual job, last year and I was about to go totally mad.
The USB-case for the HD was defect...

Now I use internal HD, 1 USB external for regular backuping and collecting data and 1 USB external to back up external + saving all added data regularly on DVDs. I got used to this procedure.

All my own SCOPE device are stored on PC1, then on USBstick, then on laptop, then send to planetz.

A few years ago I lost all data for a very complex and nice surround radioplay for which I worked three month. Luckily I had made an 8track downmix before.

It would have been awful bad, to see you suffering from the lost you first thought. I'm happy to hear, you're up well again Scope4live!

Martin

lagoausente · Post by **lagoausente** » Wed Aug 09, 2006 1:11 pm

I had purchased some time ago, a tool that scanned all the hd, and find data even from broken raid hd.
Even with a failure, the data must be there. Probably wich occurs is that isn´t stored where the data is, but with a full scan disk, all data must appear. A full scan requires some time.

dawman · Post by **dawman** » Wed Aug 09, 2006 2:04 pm

Here in Neveda, the Reno Police Department has the best forensic labs. The military sent Zarqawi's laptop there for restoration after they bombed his safe house in southern Iraq. I bet they got some real nice encryption, and restoration stuff there. No offence, but I was relived to hear of other forum members failures, as I always feel technically inferior to most everyone here. Each mistake I make is a valuable lesson, and I have made very many. I have played SFP live for 13 months now w/o one hiccup on stage, as long as my mistakes are in private it won't be a big deal. The great thing about PlanetZ and it's european members is that when I play live, you guys are just getting up and checking your messages. So I consider my European brethren as a bunch of overseas online tech guys. Where else can you get quality help like this at 11:00 PM PST?

Eric Dahlberg · Post by **Eric Dahlberg** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 2:16 pm

We put a 0+1 RAID array together this week on the office network machine. Even though this is an office machine, it's such a bad ass beast that I wanted to test it as a DAW machine to see if this could be the next killer set up. BAD IDEA! Loading the fourth card into it, one of the new PCIe UAD-1's, I got a system hang that resulted in one of the drives getting out of sync with the other three. No problem, did a rebuild & the machine was back in business.

Confident that I could always do another rebuild if anything more went wrong, I commenced trying the same card in one of the other slots. Hung again. No problem, there's one more PCIe slot to try out, right? Hung again, but this time, because I didn't do a rebuild before the last hang, I lost TWO drives (one the first hang, another the second hang). For those that aren't familiar with 0+1 RAID arrays (not that I'm a guru or anything), losing one drive isn't a problem but losing two is a 50% chance of disaster. Better odds than Roulette but I still lost.

On a positive note, the motherboard in that machine, a Gigabyte GA-M55plus-S3G, really does kick ass & I think the problem with the PCIe card was power supply-related. Also, I highly recommend going RAID 1, especially when data is so critical it can't wait for an end-of-day backup.

cemhot · Post by **cemhot** » Fri Aug 11, 2006 2:48 pm

I dont have experiences myself with getting data back.
But i know that a friend succeeded with a program called
"GetDataBack" just to put an alternative.
http://www.runtime.org/
This no freeware.

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Fri Aug 11, 2006 4:07 pm

no program will help if any of the following fails
the motor
the drive electronic
the drive's rw/head
... and 'any' fails damn often recently

the service company that will recover your data by disassembling the drive and mounting it's platter(s) in a special machine with exchangeable rw/heads will charge by the gigabyte... about 100 Euro if I remember correctly...
They only recover complete disks, though...

cheers, tom