Last night, my music hard drive (with all of the music stuff I've ever recorded) kicked the bucket. It started acting up and when through cycles where my computer wouldn't see the hard drive, so I would change some cables around and then it would work. Then I'd put it back and it would stop working. So after going through 3 different IDE cables I think I had finally ruled out the cable as being the problem. Then I tried it on our family computer. It worked the first time, so I moved it back to my computer and it kept the same cycle of working and not working, then it just stopped working. So I moved it back to the family computer where it had worked before and it no longer worked. I let it sit for about an hour or so to let it cool off and tried it again hoping I could start pulling stuff off ot it, the computer finally saw the drive and when I tried to go into it to move stuff off, it kicked me out to another directory on the C drive and when I went back the drive had dissappeared completely. *Cue heart attack* At that point I shut everything down and haven't touched it since.

My friend who is a network admin for a school district is going to look at it tomorrow because he said he's got a lot of expensive recovery tools, and I really hope he can get it back.

I was up practically all night last night stressing and freaking out over this.... Out of all the computer problems I've had over the past year or more this one is by far the worst.

And to rub salt in the wound, one of my new mics showed up today that I was going to use on our church's recording. Now I have absolutely nothing to use it on.... All of my music stuff is totally gone unless my friend can get the data off of it.

-tkr

You didn't back anything up?? I'm sorry. That's a real drag.

I have what may be a bit more bad news.

We use professional data recovery companies when simle tools won't work...and what they recover generally doesn't come back with the same file structure-it's just a drive full of files. So, depending on how the naming convention works in your app, you may or may not be able to recover the projects. You may have to sort through a million WAV files and seperate them to rebuild the projects.

This does make me feel a little better about the backup plan I just spent a lot of time/energy implementing. Since you work on a single PC, it will be easier for you--I'd recommend an extra drive-either internal or USB2/FW...and an app like Norton Ghost. The latest Ghost will do incremental drive imaging-in the background, even. Meaning after you first take a snapshot, you can schedule it to incrementally alter that snapshot image on whatever schedule. If you want to be ultra safe, you can archive those images to DVD (you can set it to span the images over multiple files of any given size...so, you can even do it to CDR-although, you'll use a lot of CDRs...

I'm pretty anal about backing up my music files. I got a DVD burner and make multiple copies in various stages of development. That doesn't help you now though . . .

I handed the drive off to my friend at church tonight. He said he's got some very expensive tools at work to get data back. I can't remember the name anymore but just one of them alone was $3,000. Unfortunately, he won't be able to get to it until Monday, so I have to bite my nails all day tomorrow too.

He said that if it can be pulled off he can do it. He does actually have quite a bit of experience in this area, so it was a relief to hear that. I guess if worse comes to worse, sending it off to be recoverd is an option. As much money as I've spent into getting slightly better gear, I think it'd be worth it to get my data back.... Practically my whole life is on that drive. But it's going to be very expensive (around $2,000 to $3,000! )

The drive was a great brand (Western Digital) and wasn't even a year old yet.... But knowing my luck with computers, I guess I shouldn't be that surprised. And the sad part is I had just talked with my friend just last week or the week before about getting a DVD burner to back up all of my stuff. Who knew the hard drive would die before I even got a chance to order the stupid thing.

-tkr

quote:

Originally posted by Popmann:
We use professional data recovery companies when simle tools won't work...and what they recover generally doesn't come back with the same file structure-it's just a drive full of files. So, depending on how the naming convention works in your app, you may or may not be able to recover the projects. You may have to sort through a million WAV files and seperate them to rebuild the projects.

With my file system, I'd have each project in separate folders, then name the wave files things like "guitar1", "vocals1", occasionally if I was recording for a band and they had more than one guitarist or singer I'd put the name of the guitarist/singer.... so that would be quite a task putting that all back again. But luckily with non destructive editing at least I wouldn't have to piece tiny clips together. I couldn't even imagine trying that with Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.... I think I would just count it as loss instead of attmepting that.

-tkr

My friend just called and said he's been working on it since 6:00am this morning (it's now almost 1:00pm) and he's been able to pull 23GB out of my Samplitude folder over. So it is a very slow going process. I'm going to head over there in a little bit so I can pick and choose the stuff I want, since some of it was junk that I was going to end up deleting eventually anyways.

He said that the motor is what's wrong with the drive and it's spinning up to 100RPM, when it should be at 7200.... He also said he's had it in and out of the freezer 12 times.

So luckily it is working and so far he's been doing it at home without all of his expensive equipment at work so let's just hope that the motor doesn't give completely while we're working on this.

-tkr

Now, when you get it back...back it up.

If my drive died in the computer, I'd lose 15min.

If the drive died in my DPS24, I'd lose whatever I've recorded since he last backup.

If the backup drive died, I'd lose however long it took me to replace it and recopy from DVDR.

Mine is pretty elaborate, but with a PC...get an external drive...Ghost it every few days...or less often depending on how fast you work.

WOOHOO!! We got it ALL! Everything that I didn't already want to delete is off of that drive now! I can't believe it! It only took about 14 and 1/2 hours to do but we slowly got every last file.

We never even had to use his expensive tools.... The only we had to do was stick the drive in the freezer. We put it in a ziplock bag and stuck it in the freezer for about 20min at a time and when it came out it copied stuff like a brand new drive. Then once the drive would heat up the time expected to copy a folder would start increasing drastically.... So we'd pull the drive back out, stick it in the freezer for 20min and when we plugged it in it would work just like new again until it warmed back up. I have heard about the freezer trick before but I had no idea it worked THAT well. I guess it depends on what the problem is, but in this case that was just the ticket and it worked flawlessly.

Now I'll finally be able to sleep tonight. I got about 3 hours the night before last and only about 4 and 1/2 hours last night. Also, now I can actually enjoy my new mic that came yesterday (the Shinybox ribbon mic)....

But another interesting thing..... The hard drive on our laptop just died! ROTF!!! This time it's funny because the drive was junk and we did have the laptop backed up, so I can laugh at this one because the timing is just too perfect. I get my drive back and on the very same day the laptop dies. LOL


Popman,

I'm going to be setting up a RAID drive for my music stuff. Everything else that is non-music is going to be backed up to DVD's. I'm not letting this happen again.

-tkr

Congrats Tekker, there's not much worse than technology messing with your creativity or sleep patterns.

quote:

I'm going to be setting up a RAID drive for my music stuff. Everything else that is non-music is going to be backed up to DVD's. I'm not letting this happen again.

Are you familiar with the different styles of RAID? The ones implemented for speed are NOT fault tolerant. The ones the are fault tolerant will make your drive write time slower than a single drive. You need 3 drives to make it both fault tolerant and zippy.

The daily/weekly ghosting is a less expensive, less intrusive on your audio apps way to handle backups, IMO.

No, I've never actually used a RAID setup before. Since there's no way I'm getting 3 200GB hard drives, then maybe daily ghosting would be the better way to go. I'll talk with my friend about that. If I'm not going to be using a RAID card, then I may end up having to get an external hard drive because all of my IDE slots are maxed out. lol

-tkr

Tekker - that's fantastic news! I have things, as I said multiplied back up. Several hard drives and then on DVDs, sometimes incrementally. Like Pop, there's no real danger of losing music, audio files.

So this should serve as a warning shot over the bow. Anything tha valuable to you should not be given to this kind of chance. Make multiple back ups. Two draves CAN fail you know.

The one thing I don't have is off site back ups. So if the house burns down I'm hosed. So I'm take a bundle over to mom's house I suppose . . .

quote:

Originally posted by Henryrobinett:
The one thing I don't have is off site back ups. So if the house burns down I'm hosed. So I'm take a bundle over to mom's house I suppose . . .

Yeah, my friend and I even talked about getting a small fire proof brief case for my backup DVD's. You can never be to cautious.

-tkr

Actually...off site is better. read the fine print on that "fire proof" safe. when you find one that's rated to keep the temperature low enough inside for "media" for a couple hours at best, you could buy a new mic cabinet with the money.

Safe deposit box at your bank is probably the best.

quote:

Originally posted by Popmann:
Actually...off site is better. read the fine print on that "fire proof" safe. when you find one that's rated to keep the temperature low enough inside for "media" for a couple hours at best, you could buy a new mic cabinet with the money.

That's probably true. I could definitely use a bigger mic cabinet. I can leave my backups at my grandparents house, or maybe even bury them in the field next to our house.

I talked to my friend about RAID'ing my drives and he said that using a dedicated RAID card won't slow the drives down. He has all of his drives RAID'ed at work and he said he wouldn't use it if it slowed them down because he needs the best performance.

Unfortunately my drive is out of the warranty now, but I can get two 250GB drives at $68 each (both drives combined is only slightly more than I payed for my 200GB drive...) So that will give me a little bit more room. Plus I'm checking into a DVD burner also, so I'll will (hopefully) be fail proof!

-tkr

I'd look at the reliablity of the hard drive manufacturer before just running and getting a big assed drive. Some companies have higher failure rates. And it's better to pay a little more if it means relaibility, IMO.

I just had a drive go south on me this week as well. As said earlier, nothing was lost, so I can sleep soundly. But in my case it was a brand new powerbook. Well, a refurbished powerbook that replaced the one that bass player ruined by spilling coffee on. And can you believe it? After a few days of tinkering with it, installing my disk image drive and getting ready for a recording tomorrow with my mobile rig the drive just proves to be unreliable. It whirs and spits and won't wake up from sleep. Luckily I can still salvage the recording I think by using my OLD drve from the coffee enabled PB placed in a firewire enclosure to run and record to from the PB.

Man, sometimes when it rains it pours.

quote:

Originally posted by Henryrobinett:
I'd look at the reliablity of the hard drive manufacturer before just running and getting a big assed drive. Some companies have higher failure rates. And it's better to pay a little more if it means relaibility, IMO.

They're Western Digital drives, so they are a very good brand. My friend said that they recently came out with a 400GB drive, so the price on the 250GB drives has dropped.

quote:

Man, sometimes when it rains it pours.

And it's done nothing but pour on me for over a year with these blasted computer problems. It's just been one thing after another and it's only been on my PC (until the laptop HD just recently died).... Our family PC has been working just fine, but I've pretty much replaced every individual part on my PC (more than once for some of the components) over the past year or so. My friend that helped me recover my data can't believe the number of computer problems I've been having, and it's always when I'm in the middle of a recording project too. Hopefully now that everything is brand new it'll stay working for a while.... Unless one of my new components dies, which wouldn't be the first time.

-tkr

This is going to sound bizarre to some, and that's fine. But I think some people just blow up electronics. I am in this category. I beta test for a company. If it's going to go wrong or break, it's going to happen to me. And completely unreproduciable stuff. Doesn't matter where it is or what gear it's on.

I think people create energy fields and masses, and some of those masses can take the form of electronics. And what one can create one can also destroy. So I think some times we can unwittingly do something or think something and something else goes "pop" somewhere else. . . . That's all I'll say on the subject . . .

quote:

Originally posted by Henryrobinett:
This is going to sound bizarre to some, and that's fine. But I think some people just blow up electronics. I am in this category. I beta test for a company. If it's going to go wrong or break, it's going to happen to me. And completely unreproduciable stuff. Doesn't matter where it is or what gear it's on.

That may not be a good thing for me then, because I'm majoring in electronics engineering.

-tkr