Sad story

[tkluck]

This could happen to you! or has it already?:bang:

Remember how all the computer geeks tell you to back things up regularly? Back things up before you screw with your computer. Back things up when you change your underwear. You've heard 'em. I heard 'em. I didn't listen.

Accidentally reformatted the partition with all of my scanned negatives on it.
(booting from an install disk without loading the sata driver: the letters changed. dumb)

Every dad gum scan gone. (yeah, I wrote over them. dumber) You might have heard the scream. Thought someone was torturing a cat? A banshee carrying off a lost soul? That was me.

It's so easy to take a few minutes and copy the scans to a cd. Leave the cd open and add to it when you scan a roll. Don't need any extra software. It's even easy with just windows xp. Highlight the files. Click the wizard. Go take a wiz of your own, and the cd has popped out before you come back (depending on the state of your prostrate)

The alternative is sitting there staring at all those almost carefully labeled envelopes. Trying to remember where and when you took that shot that needed just a little cleaning up, when you got around to it.


Then again, the negs are still there. No worse than the wet dark room days...(scratch dumbest! even though I could have written better labels)
Need to borrow a BIG light table...

 

[visiondr]

Dude, that has gotta hurt. Sorry for your loss.
Aside from sympathy, a bit of friendly advice: next time, automatically back up to an external hard drive. They're cheap and reliable.

Ron

 

[BillBingham2]

Do this. Watch for a low cost big disk (200GB or more), internal, I got several for $30 each this christmas. Go on evilBay and get an external USB housing (about $25 total). Slip the drive in and back up your data to it, once a week. Unplug it after you back them up and put the drive in another room.

I started on CDs and while they are better than tape (easier to restore), they are a pain (do not hold enough). DVDs might be better (the hold more), but still no where near 200GB.

If you can not find one on sale, I will sell you one of mine for what I paid. Backup is really an old geek sort of thing, you need to be burned a few times before you do it. When I am moving storage at work, I do three backups (I do not trust tapes). The other geeks at work laugh at me, but I have had two backups fail on me (old real to real tapes) and I am not sure that too many companies really test their backup tapes the way they should (can).

One of the beauties of negatives and slides, format d: does not wipe them out.

B2 (;->

 

[Avotius]

I dont know how many times I have told people to back things up, I bought a 250 gb hard drive and an external case for it, keeps it away from the computer and only use it when I need to

DO NOT USE DVD's!!! I dont know how many dvd's I have sitting here that dont work anymore after 6 months, piles....

 

[amateriat]

Things To Do:

1) Take a deep breath.

2) Thank your lucky stars you weren't dealing with digital capture.

3) Buy an external HD. Now.

3a) Get yourself some decent backup software. Since you mentioned Windows XP, you have quite a choice of options. For Mac folk (like me), I can highly recommend an app I only recently discovered: SuperDuper, a shareware backup app that's developing quite a following, and, unlike too many backup schemes, seems as straightforward as it is solid. The only nit some have picked about it thus far is that it only supports HDs; you're on your own if you want to back up to optical media and the like (not an issue for me, since I use CDs/DVDs strictly for archiving, which is more of a hands-on operation to my mind than something to automate).

4) If you don't have one now, get yourself a fast DVD burner; this is your second line of defense. Buy a lot of high-quality DVDs (I highly recommend these), not the stuff Staples or Best Buy happen to have on special in the front aisle. Do as decent a job of categorizing and labeling as you can to keep track of stuff; this can be aided by using...

5) An inkjet printer capable of printing directly onto CDs/DVDs (those made with inkjet-printable surfaces...you can find them fairly easily now, but I recommend the ones I linked to above for their archival keeping qualities). If you don't have one, you can get one, offered from the usual suspects, quite inexpensively. (An aside: forget about burners offering LightScribe laser-based CD/DVD label writing. Besides it being murder to find LightScribe-compatible CD/DVD media, the label-writing process is dog-slow compared to inkjet.)

Like the old joke about voting: back up early and often.

(Usual disclaimer: no connection to the above companies, etc.)


- Barrett

 

[mike goldberg]

OK Barrett and all, above,

I have a DVD burner AND an external HD.
That gives me two ways to back up My Pictures, and like many...
I haven't done it in a while 🙁 As soon as I post this quick reply,
I'm going to back up. Meanwhile, Barrett, can you tell us a bit more
about SuperDuper?

Thanks, mike

 

[Benjamin Marks]

Well, it could have been worse. Ansel Adams once lost a bunch of old acetate negatives in a fire (they were highly combustible); wait . . . it may have been Edward Weston. My point is that it is a hard lesson in terms of the hours you have put in scanning your negs, but you haven't actually lost the ability to print any image of which you have a negative. Deep breath.

There are a couple of back up strategies that have been mentioned. You might consider setting up a second drive in your computer that does nothing but mirror the contents of the first. Auto backup as you go.

I bought a SATA hard drive enclosure and have two back-ups going at all times (monthly, and I still feel like that's playing with fire). One lives here on the shelf, disconnected from any power source. The other lives on a shelf at my in-laws. I only see the need for this increasing as time goes on. I have been scanning/archiving digitally for four years now. I already have 300 GB of data. And file sizes are getting larger. And I am shooting RAW. And so on and so forth. Let's not even talk about compatibility of file types.

 

[mike goldberg]

So, there you have it...
In ten minutes, ALL My Pictures, 954 MB [I don't do much digital]...
it's all backed up to my external HD and a DVD. Both were checked,
and the data is there.

I'm sorry for anyone's loss of pix stored in a PC. To quote Avner, my
computer technician [a great young guy]...
"If anything can go wrong in computers, it will."
Thankfully, most of the time, it doesn't.
But sometimes?!?
Cheers, mike

 

[amateriat]

OK Barrett and all, above,

I have a DVD burner AND an external HD.
That gives me two ways to back up My Pictures, and like many...
I haven't done it in a while 🙁 As soon as I post this quick reply,
I'm going to back up. Meanwhile, Barrett, can you tell us a bit more
about SuperDuper?

Thanks, mike

Mike: The link in my previous post takes you to the site of SuperDuper's creators, who will give a better description than I can. Two nice things about SuperDuper are that (1) you can download it for free and use its basic functions indefinitely, and (2) the cost for the full, unlocked version is cheap (under US$30). I've tried other apps like Retrospect (powerful, but too quirky/fussy for my tastes) and La Cie's Siverkeeper (I suppose the "price" is right, and it's not too bad, when it works...which, in my experience, wasn't too often). It's no wonder most people don't bother backing up–it's more of a PITA than it really should be. SuperDuper is, if memory serves me at all, the only backup app I've used that I've gotten to grips with just five minutes after downloading it, and which worked right off the bat (well, okay, the second time...I forgot the partition I was trying to write to was write-protected by me a while back).

Enough blather from me. If you've got a Mac (running OS X 10.3.9 or later), you should give this a try.


- Barrett

 

[Laki]

This could happen to you! or has it already?:bang:

Remember how all the computer geeks tell you to back things up regularly? Back things up before you screw with your computer. Back things up when you change your underwear. You've heard 'em. I heard 'em. I didn't listen.

Accidentally reformatted the partition with all of my scanned negatives on it.
(booting from an install disk without loading the sata driver: the letters changed. dumb)

did you try to recover that partition? there are some neat tools which might help, usually they recover also formatted partitions.
just a suggestion and maybe worth a try. i used getdataback (http://www.runtime.org/) and recovered nearly all of a crashed disc.

best results as long as you didnt copy anything to the disc.

cheers and good luck
laki

 

[mike goldberg]

I've got a very standard P-IV Desktop, and am more or less, computer savvy.
What I think a lot of us need, is some kind of built-in or auto-reminder, that
begins the back up process 1-2x per week.
Ciao, mike

 

[RML]

About buying an external HDD housing... NEVER buy a plastic one! Get one made of aluminium (aluminum for Americans)! Plastic ones do NOT wisk the heat away quickly enough. I had one for 6 months before it fried my HDD interface card (or was it the disk's read head card?). Anyway, I lost access to my hard disk. I was lucky I found someone who could bypass the card, read all the data off my disk and write it on a new external disk (this time with an aluminium casing).

Another idea would be to have one of those medium or high towers loaded with only cheap but big disks, fans to cool the lot (use the kind that blow the heat out instead of sucking air in), and two(!) strong power supplies to power all the drives. Add a network card to connect it all to your pc/laptop and you have your own NAS box. 🙂

 

[c.poulton]

That's one of the reasons I worry about ever moving over to digital capture - at least with film you have a 'hard copy' backup to fall back on.

Still, your story has shocked me enough for me to go out right now and purchase a backup device for all those scans I have languising on my rarely backed up hard drive.....

 

[ffttklackdedeng]

Sorry to hear about your accident. But: formatting doesn't really remove everything from the disk, it only erases the directory. Chances are good that you can recover your data but DON'T write anything to this disk now!

Maybe everyone has to learn it the hard way, I'm through this, too. Now every Sunday is backup day

 

[RML]

Sorry to hear about your accident. But: formatting doesn't really remove everything from the disk, it only erases the directory. Chances are good that you can recover your data but DON'T write anything to this disk now!

Maybe everyone has to learn it the hard way, I'm through this, too. Now every Sunday is backup day

He already wrote over the sectors. He said so in his post.

But using a Linux version might indeed still have retrieved some data from sectors that haven't been written to, though I guess it's too late now anyway.

 

[Nikon Bob]

If it makes you fell any better, I had a virus destroy my hard drive awhile ago and lost everything. I now have an external HD for back up but I still worry as I am slowly switching to using more digital cameras and won't have neg backup for those shots. I have gone as far as keeping the SD cards of trips as back ups too as they are cheap now. Paranoid or what.

Bob

 

[Ash]

On the last day of my trip to greece I lost all my digital photo's.

 

[mike goldberg]

As I mentioned above, I'm lucky enough to have a great PC Technician; he comes to my home approx every 2 months; I keep him going with good coffee and supper.

- Avner believes in FANS! My Desktop has at least 5 or 6... including one that blows air out the FRONT panel and cools my knee ;-) My Desktop is a little noisier than some, and I've learned to love the noise.

- My current external HD is only 40GB; it will be upgraded soon. What's important is: The Housing IS made of aluminum. Further, I have it snugly resting in a small veggie basket allowing the HD to get air from the Top and the Bottom.

- The Power Supply in my Desktop is oversize... meaning extra capacity, and I think it has 2 fans of its own.

Please understand guys, I'm NOT boasting or saying, "Mine is better." Avner is a young man that can build computers from the ground up. I trust him. He has trained me to do some routine maintenance Tasks myself.

Whether we shoot film or digital, the PC is an essential part of our work flow. Like your car, the PC must be maintained periodically to prevent possible crashes or loss of data.

Cheers, mike

 

[peter_n]

I build my own computers too and the first thing I do when I buy a new box is to yank the power supply out and replace it with a higher rated unit from PC Power & Cooling.

If you want to schedule backups you might need group level backup software. I use Retrospect Workgroup v5.1 from Dantz (I think EMC now owns the product and it's up to v7.x). My environment is Win2KPro and WinXP. I run a small consulting office and Retrospect backs up all the machines and servers on the network to an Exabyte VXA drive and the tapes are partially rotated off-site. I do restores on a regular basis.

I once had a server trashed by a virus; hence the precautions.

 

[mike goldberg]

Hi Peter,

Thanks so much! If you build your own PC's and do consulting, then you certainly have something to say to us. tkluck did an amazing public service act when he shared his loss, by posting this Thread. I realized that I had been neglecting Backup. Ten minutes... that's all it took to copy-paste 954MB of pix to the external hard drive AND make a Backup CD.

Something more valid and reliable than an alarm or gizmo is required... that
will begin the Backup process automatically on schedule. I've copy-pasted your message above; Avner [my Technician] will be here for a session this week.

Cheers, mike