logic7
old school
K...
As many of you know from my many rants about the stupidity of backing things up to hard drive, I'm a big proponent of backing up to multiple media types and especially to DVD instead of hard disk.
With that out of the way... I've been REALLY lazy about backing up to anything for a bit over a year now. I still back up some of my FL Studio zip's to Zip250 while I'm working on 'em, but final versions have been going into a folder on my 160GB internal hard drive.
My machine has (had) 3 hard drives in it, a 160GB drive, and two 320GB drives. It also has an internal Zip250, and my DVD burner. External storage consists of a 2.5" 160GB USB drive.
Well... In September, my 160GB drive began throwing errors all over the place and it became horribly unstable. I took the time to push everything off of it to the spare 320GB drive... which is where all of my Pro Tools session files lived as well as some video and pics I took with my cameras. I kept saying to myself "I need to grab some DVD's to backup the important stuff...", but kept on without backing up anything.
Last weekend... the spare 320GB drive started acting up as well. Same deal, errors, corrupt files, and horribly slow access. I pushed stuff off of the spare to my primary drive and managed to move about 50GB of random stuff over to the external 160 drive.
Figuring I was going to have to send the 320 back to Seagate if there was still a warranty on it, I figured I needed to reinitialize the drive (aka, a low-level format) before sending it in. I NORMALLY do this by removing the offending drive from my machine and dropping it in an external USB enclosure so when I fire up my wipe utility, the drive is CLEARLY marked as a USB drive and there's no confusion as to which drive I'm working on.
well... I got lazy and didn't do it that way, opting to leave it in the PC and reinitialize it there.
I targeted the wrong hard drive!
I started a wipe of my PRIMARY DRIVE!!! I kicked of the wipe, walked away and came back to my PC rebooting itself after a couple of minutes. The machine no longer booted, crapping out saying there was no system disk.
All of my data on that disk... Sessions... FL files... samples... patches... MP3's... pics... video... email...
GONE!!!
Fast forward to today... Thanks to my deeper understanding of how OS's work, I deduced early this week that what likely happened is that the wipe utility started, wiped a part of the drive in use by Windows (likely by the swap file), and resulted in Windows BSOD'ing and rebooting. Because it would have overwritten the Master Boot Record (MBR) contained at the very beginning of the drive, there was nothing to boot. At the same time, the partition table and it's backup would have been wiped as well with the formatting data gone too.
however... most of the DATA should still be there, and should be recoverable.
Today, I ran a couple of utilities on the drive to try to recover any data still on the drive: The vast majority of my stuff is still there, and can be recovered. I've already restored about 20GB of random stuff from the drive, but it's kinda useless as the utility doesn't restore complete filenames, only extensions (though it does assign a dummy filename to all recovered files). The second utility DOES recover filenames, so this is far more useful to me.
I'm waiting until Monday to restore everything I can. A buddy is loaning me his 640GB hard drive, so I have enough space to restore all of my stuff.
By the end of next week, I'll have backed up all of my current crucial data to DVD's. Next year, I'll be buying a bluray burner so I can make 25GB backups instead of 8GB backups that I can with double-layer DVD's.
To all of you...
HARD DRIVES FAIL!!!
This story could have had an even worse outcome if my primary drive had failed instead of me wiping part of it... This could happen to anyone that's backing up to hard drives. Optical media is the BEST solution to backing up anything crucial.
As a side note... I pulled out all of my DVD backups from last summer... If push came to shove, I would have had to restore everything from them... but at least I had them to restore SOMETHING.
As many of you know from my many rants about the stupidity of backing things up to hard drive, I'm a big proponent of backing up to multiple media types and especially to DVD instead of hard disk.
With that out of the way... I've been REALLY lazy about backing up to anything for a bit over a year now. I still back up some of my FL Studio zip's to Zip250 while I'm working on 'em, but final versions have been going into a folder on my 160GB internal hard drive.
My machine has (had) 3 hard drives in it, a 160GB drive, and two 320GB drives. It also has an internal Zip250, and my DVD burner. External storage consists of a 2.5" 160GB USB drive.
Well... In September, my 160GB drive began throwing errors all over the place and it became horribly unstable. I took the time to push everything off of it to the spare 320GB drive... which is where all of my Pro Tools session files lived as well as some video and pics I took with my cameras. I kept saying to myself "I need to grab some DVD's to backup the important stuff...", but kept on without backing up anything.
Last weekend... the spare 320GB drive started acting up as well. Same deal, errors, corrupt files, and horribly slow access. I pushed stuff off of the spare to my primary drive and managed to move about 50GB of random stuff over to the external 160 drive.
Figuring I was going to have to send the 320 back to Seagate if there was still a warranty on it, I figured I needed to reinitialize the drive (aka, a low-level format) before sending it in. I NORMALLY do this by removing the offending drive from my machine and dropping it in an external USB enclosure so when I fire up my wipe utility, the drive is CLEARLY marked as a USB drive and there's no confusion as to which drive I'm working on.
well... I got lazy and didn't do it that way, opting to leave it in the PC and reinitialize it there.
I targeted the wrong hard drive!
I started a wipe of my PRIMARY DRIVE!!! I kicked of the wipe, walked away and came back to my PC rebooting itself after a couple of minutes. The machine no longer booted, crapping out saying there was no system disk.
All of my data on that disk... Sessions... FL files... samples... patches... MP3's... pics... video... email...
GONE!!!
Fast forward to today... Thanks to my deeper understanding of how OS's work, I deduced early this week that what likely happened is that the wipe utility started, wiped a part of the drive in use by Windows (likely by the swap file), and resulted in Windows BSOD'ing and rebooting. Because it would have overwritten the Master Boot Record (MBR) contained at the very beginning of the drive, there was nothing to boot. At the same time, the partition table and it's backup would have been wiped as well with the formatting data gone too.
however... most of the DATA should still be there, and should be recoverable.
Today, I ran a couple of utilities on the drive to try to recover any data still on the drive: The vast majority of my stuff is still there, and can be recovered. I've already restored about 20GB of random stuff from the drive, but it's kinda useless as the utility doesn't restore complete filenames, only extensions (though it does assign a dummy filename to all recovered files). The second utility DOES recover filenames, so this is far more useful to me.
I'm waiting until Monday to restore everything I can. A buddy is loaning me his 640GB hard drive, so I have enough space to restore all of my stuff.
By the end of next week, I'll have backed up all of my current crucial data to DVD's. Next year, I'll be buying a bluray burner so I can make 25GB backups instead of 8GB backups that I can with double-layer DVD's.
To all of you...
HARD DRIVES FAIL!!!
This story could have had an even worse outcome if my primary drive had failed instead of me wiping part of it... This could happen to anyone that's backing up to hard drives. Optical media is the BEST solution to backing up anything crucial.
As a side note... I pulled out all of my DVD backups from last summer... If push came to shove, I would have had to restore everything from them... but at least I had them to restore SOMETHING.
