ChrisMaverick dotcom

12-8-08

12-8-08

Day 850 of 365 Again.

Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit!!!!!

I should so not be allowed around anything remotely technological.

I have this terabyte drive. I use it as a cold storage disk. That is to say, when I’m done working on a project, I move all the source files off my main hard drive and onto the big disk, otherwise the disk in my laptop would fill up really really fast. It’s kinda a drawback to the amount of photos I take. I have a 300GB disk in my laptop and only 20 free at the moment.

Some files I work with are on the order of a gig or more, so it makes sense why I don’t like to store them locally.

Anyway, the drawback with this is that I don’t really have a way of backing those files up once they’re off my main drive. I actually double backup my laptop, but the things on the coldstorage disk are on their own. I always figured if it failed it’s no big deal since its all stuff I no longer work on and finished "flat copies" of everything are on my laptop and the two backup drives.

You see where this is going, right?

So the drive seems to have failed today. Or at least at some point in the recent past. It won’t spin up at all. This sucks, because I had recently decided to reedit all of my old tarot cards. And guess what I don’t have the source files to anymore.

FUCK!!!

From here on out I’m done with technology. No more computers. No more software. No more hardware.

Tomorrow I’m going to find a nice cave to move on and my artwork will be drawn on the walls with rock.

Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit!!!

365 days

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11 comments for “12-8-08

  1. December 9, 2008 at 5:39 am

    Shit indeed! 🙁

    This happened to me once. Sometimes it is still possible to recover data.

    I have two identical external hard drives now, mirrored copies. It’s not going to happen to me again!

  2. December 9, 2008 at 5:45 am

    aww hon. that sucks! There’s gotta be someone from our geek-filled past who could help fix it enough to recover the data.

    But if not just let me know when your cave-art show will be so I can have enough time to walk there (can’t trust all them cars with their pesky computers and stereos in ’em)

  3. December 9, 2008 at 6:55 am

    I won’t go on about my four tier backup scheme [pushes taped glasses back up nose] but I had lost the first five thousand photos I had ever taken in a hard drive debacle.

    Never again.

    My advice would be to not plug it back in and get some pro help. My god the prices on data recovery these days. . . Good luck.

  4. December 9, 2008 at 6:56 am

    Ouch! Happened to me too. Pick yourself up a Drobo – throw in four 1-terabyte drives, you’ll get about 2tb storage, and it will distribute your data.

  5. December 9, 2008 at 9:41 am

    hate to say this but you should have had backups lol

    buy a drobo its idoit proff ( not saying your an idoit at all lol ) its pricey but worth it

    its a auto storage center you really couldint brake it if you tried you simpy put more then 2 drives in it and it auto configs them and if one fails then it restores from an auto backup never loose data again!

  6. December 9, 2008 at 10:53 am

    Man, that sucks. Whenever someone loses a drive I just shudder inside; I do backups fairly often, but who’s got time to do them every day? I know I’d lose a lot of work if one of my machines died.

    I’m no expert, but I’d think it could just be the drive’s power source, in which case the information is still on there and retrievable. It’s worth checking out, anyway.

  7. December 9, 2008 at 1:36 pm

    Have you tried taking the drive out of the enclosure and putting it in another enclosure? Failing that, professional data recovery may be your only option.

  8. December 9, 2008 at 8:54 pm

    Sorry for the loss of your material. Now, that having been said, the idea of you abandoning technology is, what is the phrase, ‘truly friggin’ hilarious!’

    (IMHO: Maybe an off-site, web-based X-drive might be the foundation of a functional fail-safe…)

    Good luck

  9. December 9, 2008 at 9:54 pm

    Sorry to hear. Its been a while since I had to get anything recovered (people put the strangest stuff on their laptops in the corporate world, that should be somewhere much safer).

    If you’re feeling ambitious you could pull the drive out of the enclosure and freeze it, yes in the freezer. Sometimes you can get one last shot at data recovery that way.

  10. December 10, 2008 at 12:45 am

    @wimdejonge: I actually do have multiple backups for my laptop itself. this is just my cold storage disk. 99% of the time, they’re files that I never want to modify again. And they’re so big that it was always an issue to back them up. I’m definitely going to have to fix that now.

    @mickeysacks: been working on it. I’m losing hope. *sigh*

    @j.buck: well, if it’s recoverable by normal means, I’ll be able to do it myself. At this point it’s not looking good though, and actual data recovery experts are actually way expensive and I’m not going to be able to do that reasonably. So it’s probably a lost cause.

    @Kabren Levinson: yeah, it’s on my amazon wish list. I really want one, but at $450, it’s still a bit much. I really do need to get one soon. Maybe Santa will be nice to me.

    @gatepc: As I mentioned, I am familiar with the Drobo. I do want to get one at some point soon. As for the backups, like I said, the disk is actually used specifically for stuff that it doesn’t make sense to backup. Photoshop layer files and the like. It was a a 1000GB disk and 700GB of it was full. I go through scratch space storage like crazy. The real truth is that when I decided that I DID want those scratch files again, I should have immediately moved them back to a location which was being backed up and I didn’t. I put it off.

    @madmolecule: I actually have hourly backups running of my laptop. Like I said, its the stuff that isn’t normally worth backing up that is killing me. It’s really the worst possible thing. 600 of the 700 gigs on there I don’t care about even a little bit. It’s that last 100 that is just killing me right now.

    @sui66iy: I haven’t yet. It’s an old style LaCie TB drive. Meaning its really two 500GB drives RAID0’d together in a special case. So I’m not sure I’ll be able to recombine them once I removed them, and that would kill any warranty on it, assuming there is one, which i am still waiting to hear, as well.

    @DeHoll: umm… not really, I pretty much hate computers. And off site backups wouldn’t have helped here either. Really, I just am going to need to start backing up my coldstorage as well, which is just going to get expensive.

    @cpmiv: well, like I mentioned above, I’m not sure I can just remove the disks. Still waiting to hear from LaCie. Freezing it in its steel case was no good though. I tried it earlier tonight.

  11. January 8, 2009 at 1:16 am

    Not sure what the end result of this was, but if you can get them to spin up in a regular computer (i.e. its the array not the drives) it’s not that hard to recover. For RAID 0 you just need to figure out the stripe width, then open() the two device files, do a read() on each device that’s the stripe width (64k, 128k etc are popular), and then write() the buffers from both to a single disk or file. I had to do this with a failed RAID 5 array about 2 years ago with 6 drives.

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