Hard lesson learned - Everythings gone

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Well, I do backup. I always have. Using a Time Capsule for wireless backup. But for whatever reason, I decided to erase it to start a fresh as I'd given the iMac a good tidy up and deleted some stuff I didn't want/need. Well, as luck would have it (not), I managed to drop the iMac downstairs whilst moving some furniture around and re-jigging the spare room. Long story short, the insurance wrote it off and posted my hard drive back to me. Guess what happened next?

Whiiiiirrrr, click. Whiiiiiiirrrr, click. Yep, looks like it's had it, and with it have gone pretty much all my photos. Aside from a few 1500px versions on Flickr, I have lost the lot. Not to mention the expense of having to purchase a new machine. Holiday snaps, portrait shoots with paid models. Everything has gone.

Gutted. I guess expensive data recovery is an option but I just can't afford that right now.
 
Feel for you mate I learned the hard way too, good job it was non essential stuff I deleted.

Now I have all my pics on two separate external hard drives and then on the pc and also on the laptop.
 
Thats a sad loss for you.
Hang onto it and check out data recovery and how much it would cost. See if there is a local computer chap around who could do it as some do a good job and are quite reasonable. Then when your better off can get it sorted or perhaps cash towards it at birthday or xmas present time from relatives etc.
 
Thanks folks.

It's currently gone next door to my neighbour who does some degree of data recovery but he agreed that by the sounds of it, it may need to go to a clean room for some degree of rebuild to be able to get some data off it. :(

Will see about getting some quotes.
 
Is it totally gone? Whirrs and clicks don't sound good, otherwise:

Can you hook up your non working Mac to a working Mac with a firewire cable?
Target boot the non working machine by holding down the T while it boots. The 'failed' hard drive will show up on the working Mac.
 
I don't have the non working mac. It's with the insurance company. I only have the HD. I bought an enclosure and connected it via USB. It won't show up at all in the finder. It's looking like mechanical failure. One company have quoted £429 + VAT for recovery.
 
I feel for you :( My EHD went up the creek earlier in the year. Thankfully most of the photos were backed up onto another hard drive, but that one was full so i'd got about 6 months of photos only backed up to the other one :( Husband took it apart, thinking he could fix it (it appeared to be the usb connector that had gone) but it wouldn't pick it up on the computer, just kept saying it needed to be formatted. We then found the receipt and realised it was less than a year old and i could have taken it back and go the dodgy part changed, grrrrrrrrrrrrrr. We are still hoping pc world may be able to rescue it (they did 6 hours work on my laptop hard drive for £30, got it working enough that i could get the data off). But until then my last 6 months of everything are unaccounted for :(
 
What about data recovery of the backup drive? Even after the format you should be able to get the data back from there?
 
Phil V said:
What about data recovery of the backup drive? Even after the format you should be able to get the data back from there?
Click to expand...

Good point Phil, especially as it was only the simple level erase. It won't be the most up to date recovery i don't think but better than nothing? It will involve stripping the time capsule down and removing the HD from it though. :( Will see how next door neighbour gets on with the other one first.
 
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This is why I always recommend backing up to DVD/CD disk first before even to a computer hard drive. Having had a hard drive crash on me due to manufacture fault I didn't loose any photos. Many recommend backing up to a second hard drive but after my experience its DVD/CD disks every time.

Realspeed
 
realspeed said:
This is why I always recommend backing up to DVD/CD disk first before even to a computer hard drive. Having had a hard drive crash on me due to manufacture fault I didn't loose any photos. Many recommend backing up to a second hard drive but after my experience its DVD/CD disks every time.
Click to expand...

I've never backed up to CD or DVD but I wait until the images are on both of my duplicate external drives before formatting any memory cards, it's a system that thankfully hasn't failed me yet!
 
A tip from me (and this works before anyone says otherwise :) )

Find a second hand model of the exact same drive on eBay etc, lock yourself away for a few hours and dismantle the faulty drive, find a fault, if to no avail, you then have to remove the platters and put them in the working drive - this is on the proviso that the platters aren't damaged / scratched.

I work for Lockheed Martin part time and this is what we do with drives that have been in crashes in UAV's etc (although we order in new parts but it's the same basis)
 
Flightphoto said:
A tip from me (and this works before anyone says otherwise :) )

Find a second hand model of the exact same drive on eBay etc, lock yourself away for a few hours and dismantle the faulty drive, find a fault, if to no avail, you then have to remove the platters and put them in the working drive - this is on the proviso that the platters aren't damaged / scratched.

I work for Lockheed Martin part time and this is what we do with drives that have been in crashes in UAV's etc (although we order in new parts but it's the same basis)
Click to expand...

Whilst I am reasonably decent at things like this, I was lead to believe it was very tricky and involved a 'clean room' and other such wizardry?!
 
Clean rooms help but if you do it over a tray with water that will prevent dust getting about, make sure you have a rocket blower handy aswell, wear a t-shirt and non latex gloves as normal latex gloves are powdered. This is a last resort before spending severe funds on a data recovery company to do such :(
 
Well my neighbour has looked and can't get anything off it. He says that expensive data recovery is the only option. An identical drive will cost me up to £45 looking on eBay. I can either have a go it put £45 towards the professionals?! But can't afford the full whack yet. Not even sure my photos are worth it although the missus argues our holiday photos are.
 
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I'd certainly look at going with Phil's suggestion and recovering the data off your backup drive. I know nothing about MACs but there is a plethora of data recovery and unformatting software for FAT32 or NTFS drives.
I'm guessing there will be good stuff about for a MAC as well, but the most important thing is not to write anything at all to the drive.
Try typing "mac data recovery software" into Google; there's lots of hits

Good Luck
 
Photorec is a good utility for recovering picture data from hard drives.
If the disk was repartitioned at all then Testdisk is another useful tool to recover deleted partitions.
If you do have another hard drive of same/bigger size it's sometimes a good idea to clone the drive with the lost data to it and play with the clone first, especially if the process recovers lost pictures rather than finds them and copies them to another drive.
 
Is there no way to recover it from the time capsule?
Sorry don't know much about them
 
Almost_Invisible said:
Photorec is a good utility for recovering picture data from hard drives.
If the disk was repartitioned at all then Testdisk is another useful tool to recover deleted partitions.
If you do have another hard drive of same/bigger size it's sometimes a good idea to clone the drive with the lost data to it and play with the clone first, especially if the process recovers lost pictures rather than finds them and copies them to another drive.
Click to expand...

All good advice, as long as the HDD isn't broken (which, unfortunately, it is!).
 
I learned the stupid way. I backup up all my data onto a separate hard disk in order to reformat the main drive. Somehow or other Windows XP interpreted Format C: as a commabd to wipe both drives and partition the whole lot as one large drive! Years of work lost in one fell swoop and I still don't know how it actually happened!
 
If you value the data, don't let any un-professional touch it, send it to a professional, yes it costs, you need to think if your data is worth it to you.

I wouldn't let anybody near it, not even attempt it myself even though im a technical person for a living.
 
Alan Clogwyn said:
I learned the stupid way. I backup up all my data onto a separate hard disk in order to reformat the main drive. Somehow or other Windows XP interpreted Format C: as a commabd to wipe both drives and partition the whole lot as one large drive! Years of work lost in one fell swoop and I still don't know how it actually happened!
Click to expand...

But it shouldn't of been lot, that is easy to recover.
 
Alan Clogwyn said:
I learned the stupid way. I backup up all my data onto a separate hard disk in order to reformat the main drive. Somehow or other Windows XP interpreted Format C: as a commabd to wipe both drives and partition the whole lot as one large drive! Years of work lost in one fell swoop and I still don't know how it actually happened!
Click to expand...

It would be easy to recover from a formated drive aslong as data is not written over the top.

Same way you restore a SD card which has been formatted, various software tools for £15 or so.
 
Carbonangel said:
It would be easy to recover from a formated drive aslong as data is not written over the top.

Same way you restore a SD card which has been formatted, various software tools for £15 or so.
Click to expand...

See my link previous post and it's free
 
Bicko said:
All good advice, as long as the HDD isn't broken (which, unfortunately, it is!).
Click to expand...

I assumed the backup device contained hard drives and there was a possibility to restore them to the state they were in before the deletion.
Never used one so don't know if files are stored in a similar fashion to just a HDD or more RAID like.
 
Another vote for looking on your time capsule drive.

I had similar thing a few years back. I copied all "my documents" folder to a backup drive, wiped the main computer then reinstalled the OS. A few days later I realised I hadn't copied for whatever reason the "My Pictures" folder where all my photos were stored. I was facing total loss of all my photos. An arse clenching moment.

Took me a while but i found a few recovery programs which did allow me to retrieve lost photos on my formatted drive and i then later found an older backup to complete the rest.

I now have mirrored copy on my server, time capsule at the other side of the house hidden, an encrypted external disk in car and Crashplan....I never ever want to be in that situation again. Paranoid? Maybe!
 
I've just had my macbook drive fail, luckily I was able to use time machine to back it up before it gave up.

spare drive installed and the system is running again with nothing lost.

btw, time machine works with any external HDD :)
 
Interesting point about the time capsule working with any HDD. Hadn't really thought about that. So you remove the 500GB that's in there and replace with a bigger one, then use the 500 as an external in a housing and attempt to recover from it?!
 
Sorry to hear you've suffered what would be most photographers' nightmare.
CD DVD storage is very safe, but modern backup systems require much greater memory capacity for raw files, video etc.
I use Chronosync to back up to two LaCie external partitioned drives.
Look at:-
http://www.econtechnologies.com/pages/cs/chrono_overview.html
It is a system which permits operation between external drives. A lot of systems just do internal to an external backup.
It will also do a bootable backup which permits you to run the iMac from an external drive in the event of an internal systems drive failure, so you can continue working.
If you value your images, then you need to invest in a good, extensive back-up system.
Hope this helps.
 
gazmorton2000 said:
Interesting point about the time capsule working with any HDD. Hadn't really thought about that. So you remove the 500GB that's in there and replace with a bigger one, then use the 500 as an external in a housing and attempt to recover from it?!
Click to expand...

I used three drives


1. the drive thats failing, leave in the machine for the moment,

2. an intermediate drive, that must be equal or bigger than the one you are backing up from, this will be your external USB drive that you will use time machine to back up to

3, the replacement drive, again this has to equal or larger than the back up file, this drive will be installed after the failing drive has backed up and been removed.


sequence of steps:

1. boot from the failing drive and plug in your external drive, sometimes you might get a message asking if you want to use it as a time machine back up disk, if so click yes, or go into system prefs and click time machine back up


2. when time machine opens, there is a big switch box, make sure it is on, click select disk and select your external HDD, it will then start counting down to next back up, ignore this and click back up now.
The entire failing HDD will back up onto the external drive.

3. once done, remove the failing drive and install the replacement HDD, plug in you external drive and boot from a mac OSX install DVD, click on restore image from time machine, it will then restore your time machine back up you made earlier from your external drive.

4. Reboot

5. your mac will boot like nothing has happened, job done.

:)
 
and people slate flickr, use it as a cheap online backup, and hide all your photos if you dont want people to see the personal/family/private ones.

Any local failure you can then re download all the originals in one clean sweep already in folders.

not to mention the plugin you can have running in the background of windows (sure you can get one for macs) which downloads any picture you upload to flickr and puts it in a organised folder as a backup in any locations you select.

Someone mentioned cd/dvd storage is safe, pppfffhhh chance it if you will but i dont trust any cd/dvd optical media, safest option of backup is 2 hard drives that have the same stuff on it backed up and a cloud storage (flickr), so if a hard drive packs up just replace with a new one and re-sync, or if both drives go then re download from cloud or flickr again.
 
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never ever ever ever ever carry out any hardware work whilst you have no backup in place..

I would agree with people saying to try and recover the erased time capsule.

realspeed said:
This is why I always recommend backing up to DVD/CD disk first before even to a computer hard drive. Having had a hard drive crash on me due to manufacture fault I didn't loose any photos. Many recommend backing up to a second hard drive but after my experience its DVD/CD disks every time.

Realspeed
Click to expand...

BrynBoru said:
CD DVD storage is very safe
Click to expand...

disagree. DVD/CD delaminate over time if not stored correctly. if youre going to use optical look at bluray which is constructed differently.
 
Rob 80386 said:
I used three drives

1. the drive thats failing, leave in the machine for the moment,

2. an intermediate drive, that must be equal or bigger than the one you are backing up from, this will be your external USB drive that you will use time machine to back up to

3, the replacement drive, again this has to equal or larger than the back up file, this drive will be installed after the failing drive has backed up and been removed.

sequence of steps:

1. boot from the failing drive and plug in your external drive, sometimes you might get a message asking if you want to use it as a time machine back up disk, if so click yes, or go into system prefs and click time machine back up

2. when time machine opens, there is a big switch box, make sure it is on, click select disk and select your external HDD, it will then start counting down to next back up, ignore this and click back up now.
The entire failing HDD will back up onto the external drive.

3. once done, remove the failing drive and install the replacement HDD, plug in you external drive and boot from a mac OSX install DVD, click on restore image from time machine, it will then restore your time machine back up you made earlier from your external drive.

4. Reboot

5. your mac will boot like nothing has happened, job done.

:)
Click to expand...

Not sure you got what's happened fully, apologies if I've read all this wrong. As it stands, apart from a failed drive that's out and needs proper dismantling to recover any data, I have a time capsule with deleted data but not overwritten. I am now going to remove that hard drive and plug into my new system and attempt to recover deleted files with software.
 
Stage 1. Remove hard drive from time capsule. Completed. Easy job. Heat gun, 10 screws and unplug. Proceeding to stage 2.
 
Apologies I read it wrong,

What I've detailed is backing up a failing drive on a mac before it fails with time machine software and a generic external HDD.

In your case with the time capsule, I'm not sure.

:)
 
This is why I have changed my backup routine this year. I have the following system:
- all photos stored on iMac (and some on MacBook if I've been travelling)
- all backed up to external hdd using timemachine
- all backed up to Amazon Glacier/S3 using Arq
- a small subset stored on Flickr

I will probably add another external Hdd to this (backed up to with timemachine) that will be kept offsite.

It's all automated and needs virtually no input from me.

I would highly recommended everyone takes backup extremely seriously.
 
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