Most catastrophic loss
The other day I was reading Griff Rhys Jones had to bail from his boat and abandon his laptop that had the only copy of his novel he'd been working on for two years solid.
What's the most amount of work/data you've lost due to hard drive failure, viruses or tornado?
I was watching fight club the other day and was curious as to whether there was any truth to the fact you could blow up some central data centre somewhere in the world and all/most of our credit history would revert to zero. I can't believe it would be that simple (well not simple but...) surely all that stuff is backed up all over the world in case that happened.
Anyway what's the worst loss of data you've ever had yourself or heard of happening?
What's the most amount of work/data you've lost due to hard drive failure, viruses or tornado?
I was watching fight club the other day and was curious as to whether there was any truth to the fact you could blow up some central data centre somewhere in the world and all/most of our credit history would revert to zero. I can't believe it would be that simple (well not simple but...) surely all that stuff is backed up all over the world in case that happened.
Anyway what's the worst loss of data you've ever had yourself or heard of happening?
Replies
Thankfully it was all shite and I had only very slightly outdated versions of my most recent models on my USB stick.
Needless to say, I now back up my 3D folder to a separate drive every week :P
I had a number of hard drive failures last year and now I won't buy any drive with less than a 5 year warranty and good reliability in addition to backing up stuff on multiple drives.
Barring a house fire thats enough for now.
edit: Although I was reading an article where they tried various methods of destroying hard drives and that most hard drives work after driving a car over them and putting them in water :P
Har har...
swell.
Needless to say the drive was not receptive of the heads plowing into the platters.
Lost 6 months of 3d work.
As far as I know the data can still be saved. It will cost me $500-1000 dollars to possibly retrieved the data, which I can't swing right now, but hopefully, one day, I will get all my music and porn back. *eyes well up* I suddenly feel like going to sleep.
These days I have SyncBackSE automatically backing up any changes to my 3D folder every 24 hours, putting one copy on my external USB drive, and another on Amazon's S3 servers using JungleDisk.
All my "work" is in an internet cloud and synced over three different macs. It's the only way. I literally have 4 copies of the same data with deleted files archived in the cloud. (I used dropbox btw).
It's only 50gb but it's more than enough for all my art, models, websites, text, references etc. Of course, no videos or music on there.
I can recommend this:
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_pc.php
or
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
got my drive back for just enough to grab everything I really needed. The drive wouldn't even spin normally, just sat there ticking. This software is magic.
It's the same software they use at the place where they charge $500-1000, so save yourself the money!
Yeah mine has the dreaded ticks, just like that.
Mine is Windows based, what was yours?
Did yours start skipping when you powered it on or when you tried to access data on it?
Wait, I take that back...
I will always remember the tear that rolled down my cheek the first time I put in the original Legend of Zelda cartridge into my tattered NES only to reveal all my hard work was gone... Granted I was about 7, but it was traumatic nonetheless... *sniffle*
I said it once before and i'll say it again:
http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/ <This program has saved my ass plenty-o-times.
SPINRITE
http://www.grc.com/srrecovery.htm
Once upon a time, many years ago, I was just starting out learning how to paint in photoshop. This was on quite an old computer, and none to fast. It also had almost no space left on the hard drive. Nonetheless, I perservered and created my first painting in photoshop!
I had been learning traditional painting at the time and wanted to try it out using Photoshop as well. In the end, after quite a few hours in my all-to precious youth, it was completed and I was more than happy with the results. "Wow, I did that with Photoshop!" I thought. And then, now that it was complete, and I was ready to proudly show it to my parents... was the time to save. So, I go to save... and... like I said, there was about no space on this old computer... and it was unable to save and because it was so low on memory it crashed the program. And I lost the painting.
No, it wasn't anything special, and it really wasn't that much time that I lost. But... it being in my youth, where spending one hour on art felt like a lot, this was traumatic!! And now... I am a saving nazi, and have been lucky to have lost nothing significant since.
Nowadays having a passport or more is good instead of just having one main hdd.
Long while ago, like 2001 I lost a years worth of photos, skins, and early 3d work. I then bought a CD burner.
I also lost a lot of drawings from when I was kid when someone threw them away by mistake.
Yup, Valve´s Hammer Editor turned me into a saving nazi as well. People with any experience with it will know what I mean
I'd take a look at spinright, I've heard it's good for HD maintenance and if done monthly, can help warn when a drive is beginning to die. That, and just backup your work. Burn it to a disk, something.
almost every HDD I've owned since high school has failed catastrophically, so work gets backed up daily