Let this be a lesson to me...and you...

schuylercat

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I am writing this post on my new computer. Very exciting - big fast processor, lotsa ram, a pair of big fat 500GB hard drives, screaming fast video card.

What is NOT on my new computer is several thousand photos I've taken since Septemeber 13 2007. Those are gone. Gone gone gone. My daughter's birthday, my nephew's wedding, all the shots I've taken with my 40D since I got it and all the Photoshop experimentation I was working on. Gone. The old computer is still smoking, but through the smoke it's giggling at me. I just know it.

Do I even need to say this? Probably not for most of you, but some might look around and say "gee, I haven't backed up in a while myself..."

Back up your stuff. What if I'd had a shoot on that hard drive? Photographers get sued over that sort of stupid mistake.

I have a few friends who've said things like "oh, that's awful. Dang computers." The more astute of my friends have been less charitable: "what, are you stupid? Ever herard of burning CD's? Backup drives? You're an IT professional, right? What a moron..." It goes on and on, but hey - they're right.

So now I'm off to find all the free Photoshop plugins and tools I had downloaded, and when I do I'll back them up too. Oh, yes I will.

While I do that, I invite one and all who have not yet done so to perform a full backup routine today. Unless everyone already has, and I am the only one...

Ciao all.
 
I've had that happen once myself, so I know exactly how you feel. Now I have 3 external drives, and a stack of CDs and DVDs I can't see over if I stack them on top of each other. I'm in the habit now of burning every picture I take straight to a CD when I take them off the card, and I keep a folder on my desktop for everything else I want to keep backed up, and I burn the folder when it reaches around 650MB.

Is it possible for you to remove the hard drive and maybe connect it to the new computer to retrieve the stuff on it? If there's that much on it you don't want to lose, you could probably see if it can be rebuilt or the information restored professionally. A good friend of mine had a drive rebuilt/restored and was able to get back nearly everything she had lost, but it cost her about $700. For her, it was worth it to get all her pictures back. She said it turned out to be like paying about 5 cents per picture to get them back.

Sorry to hear of your loss though. I hope there's some way you can get back what's on that drive.
 
treid taking out the old hard disk and putting it in the new one to see if the disk still works? if ti does, than you can just drag-n-drop all of your stuff onto your new computer.
 
And if it wants to go but can't, put it in the freezer for an hour or two and try again while it's still very cold (you'll need to have everything ready before you take the Hdd out of the freezer of course).
 
I just had a big HD crash myself. It actually happened the same day as I was backing up and reorganizing my files on a new HD. As a part of that process all my data was stored on only one HD waiting to be backed up. Before I got around to back it up my new HD crashed. I was able to recover 90% of what i lost with a $29 recovery software. I lost a lot of filenames and folder structures, but the images was there so I had a great weekend of sorting images....

Did you try any recovery at all, or did your old HD actually catch on fire or something?
 
I backed up a lot of photos to a portable external harddrive as well as to my computer.

The computer power supply blew out the internal harddrive and my external harddrive that was connected to it as well.

skieur
 
I had that happen, and had to have a very expensive rescue done. It only took that one time....LOL.

Now I have a Trillibite of removable storage, as well as burn backup system, and ghosted secondary computer. I keep them in 3 separate locations at all time.

Sorry you learned that lesson the hardway too.
 
My husband, (a computer programmer) always tells me, "It's not a matter of IF your harddrive crashes. Its a matter of WHEN it crashes."

Our "WHEN" already happened once too, but luckily he was able to buy another drive and trade parts to get our data back.
 
I have worked at Ritz camera since all this digital stuff started and I think everyday of the people who in 5-10 years after buying a new computer and not thinking about copying their images they are not going to have anything. Prints fade and I think the prints now are being mde of a much lesser quality or people are even going the ink-jet route and not burning everthing and they will have nothing. I am proud to say that I tried to educate all of the new digital photographers that bought their first camera from me because somebody has to.
 
Hehehe...nice to know I wasn't alone.

Hey Mike E - I think I'll try the freezer thing. Interesting idea. As for the drive, it made the same lovely "clickety...clacketyclick...whizz..." noise in the new machine. I may try to get the data off there at a local shop - the cost is high, but some of the pics are priceless. Not money shots, just 4 months of my kids lives, which are far more valuable to this hopeful amatuer.

Now: off to the freezer I go! I'm thinking seized drive, shrink the metals in the cold...and hope for the best. Can't hurt...

Thanks guys!
 
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Ive had my 300gig Hd crash on me with all my photos on it, All I did was go into msdos and type
dskchk k:/r
and bam it was fixed though I did back up all my photo onto another hd. It still crashes from time to time and I can still recover it every time.
 

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