Just lost my *entire* 80 GB external HD. . .

You know that movie I was working on? "Detective Taydon and the Mystery of Sifo-Dyas?"

Well, apparently my 80 gig thought that it sucked really bad, and decided to do me a favor by erasing my entire drive.

Not only did I lose every project for my movie, I also lost all of my website files, work for my school's yearbook, and over 5 days worth of MP3's.

How was I supposed to back up over 60 GB worth of data? I lost it all, and I guess now it doesn't matter. Losing my drive you'd think would be enough, but I also recently found out that Apple is going to start charging for their "free" webspace.

So, my movie will not be coming out as soon as I had hoped (ie, before school starts) and I may never finish it. So, who wants to stick around to see me cry?

 

Well, that really sounds like a worst case. I can understand that you feel very miserable!

Just to be sure: How do you know that your data is really gone? Have you had a look at the partition table or the raw device?
You shouldn't count on that, but sometimes it is possible to restore data, even if the hard drive's processors are physically destroyed.

What is your exact status?

 

Awww man I feel so sorry for you. That can be so bad. I'm always worried about losing my hard drive.

Guess this is a lesson to make frequent CD backups of all important stuff.

But as Frisian says, double check it just in case it can be salvaged.

 

Well, since it's an external drive, my first thought was that it's the computer or the wire (neither of which were the case). When I would plug it in through fire-wire, my Mac wouldn't read it, and said that the disk hasn't been formatted. It gave and option to either Eject or Initialize, and that kind of freaked me out.

So, I took the drive over to a friends house, and had his dad (one of my computer graphic teachers) and had him run Disk Warrior and Norton on it. It had the name showing up at least (The Mighty Big 80 Gig) but it said that 76.8 GB was available, bascially the factory setting.

We tried our damndest, but had to settle for initialzing it, and hoping that Disk Warrior would restore it. Well, it didn't, and there's not much I can do about it now, but to start over.

 

Unless you overwrote all of the data on your disk it really should still be there, it just needs to be found again.

What disk is it (an External Maxtor?)

Have you tried good old Disk First aid on it? What actually happens, can you just not see the Hard-drive icon on your desktop?

As for the Apple webspace, it's such good value, I've just bought an iDisk account, and it's 100MB of disk space for $49.99 a year, so that doesn't appear to be to much of a disaster.

EDIT: Oh, it appears you did overwrite all of the data then. Oopsie.

 

Sorry to hear about that. What brand of drive was it? I was looking at getting an 80gig firewire drive. Although the drive itself is a Seagate. They're usually reliable.

 

Oh dear... DaftMaul is right: If the drive has been *reinitialized*, then there has probably a new file system been created (I'm not so familiar with the Mac's terminology). Not good! Anyway, one last question: How much time did this process take? Did the drive have enough time to physically overwrite the complete 80GB with zeros?

 

I would say since its an external drive and it appears blank/unformatted then there is a good chance a magnetic scource erased it. Start backtracking everywhere its been. Did you lay it on a tv or stereo?, or a speaker?, maby there is a magnet laying around that erased it.




SWmaster

 

Mountain Dew anybody?

/me ducks


anyway,

Nick "Shorty" Long

 

*SLAMS a mountain dew can into Nicks Forhead* Dont be bad mouthin the dew! Remember that was a hoax damnit! =P

 

It will cost you a lot of money, but you could take it to a professional recovery service. I did that when I lost my internal Wester Digital on my PC. It was a 10gig and it had ALL my 3D models, animations and pictures. It cost me $200 dollors. Problem is, I only got back files I didn't need. None of my 3D stuff.

I know exactly how you feel. I had models I had worked on for a year, like my ultra realistic Ferrari 550. Gone, haven't had the heart to start that over.

 

I usually backup my files onto CD also. My last backup was last month. But the problem is, you end up having all these CD's full of your data. I guess that the trick so to not accumulate so many is to use CR-Rws, huh? Or just leave the CD sessions open or whatever. When you backup your drive, you also normally would throw away your old ones as you know have the updated data.
The problem with this whole gig is, that you never know when you're gonna lose your HD to some nasty accident...

Carl

 

YOUCH!

Don't lose heart, ewing. There are DATA RECOVERY people out there that may be able to save your stuff.

Don't give up, yet!

 

You know...
To make backups in the future, your best bet might be to get an extra hard disk. 40Gig drives are under $100 and it sure is easy to copy over your files on a regular basis.

Plus, if you ever needed to go to the back up, you could work directly off the backup drive. No "restore" procedure/effort required.

Good luck.

Try to still have fun.

 

that really sucks! i was looking forward to that movie! You do know that apple is going to charge for webspace and an e-mail address

 

Get DVD-RAM... back up the whole thing on a couple of those discs. And you can use them over again.

 

yeah sorry man, that does suck. and im always getting mad at my comp when photoshop freezes up on me during rotoscoping. heh

 

Invest in a DVD burner! I did. You can get dowble sided disc that hold almost 10 gig.
I bought 1 for $275... The best money I ever spent!

 

^^^But those take forever to burn, and you can only burn one side at a time... mine as well just get 2 dvd-r discs for cheaper.

Cya
Mike

 

Yeah, but for under $100 you can just get a 40Gig hard disk and copy all your data to that. You need at least 10 DVDs or 70! CD's to store the same information. (Plus it's all in one place and its much faster than CD or DVD.)

Just get an extra drive, plug it in, and copy your data every couple-a-days.

Have fun.

 

True another drive is cheaper.. and No it doesn't take forever to burn. 2x DVD burning is equivalent to about 8X CD burning.

 

true but I got 10 blank DVD's for $15 on the internet.....