My external hard drive just deleted itself...

[marcus]

My external harddrive (WD 800 gig drive) is now displaying 700 gig of available space - meaning 600 gig of tunes, samples, movies etc have disappeared. This is not good at all, particularly being a semi digital dj - basically 90% of all my tunes have disappeared, less those i ripped to cd (not many in the scheme of things since I moved to Serato.) This must be the definition of Serato hell.

FARRRRRRKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The only thing that could have caused it was it falling on its side before - could this have caused it?

[unsoundbwoy]

that could do it
was it on or off? if it was off
it's got a good chance of not being as fucked
just gotta decide whether replacing the data or paying for data recovery is more expensive/more of a fuckaround

[flippo]

this happened to me last year. I lost all the tunes I'd finished, all the tunes I was working on, all my music library, movies, samples, original recordings, photos, and 2 years of work on my doctorate, and the GPS co-ordinates of about $40k worth of equipment.

basically my heart, soul and career was on that drive and I never backed it up!

ac23 to the rescue after a week of sooking/contemplating suicide. Got me onto a program called "Winternals", operating system you download and boot off a CD that has all sorts of nerdy tools - managed to get 90% of my data back.

... and yes I learnt my lesson, fucking back-up everything you daft cunt.

[Direkt]

Dang, that sucks Marcus.

Sounds like a good prog Flippo.

[a1studmuffin]

Glad to hear you got your data back Consider this a scare to always back up your data that you don't want to lose, to more than one type of media and to more than one location. (eg. DVD-R/external HDD/Gmail/FTP server, with one at home and one at work or "in the cloud".) Hard drives live an average of 5-15 years, but it's possible for them to die at any point. Similarly, DVD-Rs can scratch, deteriorate or simply be faulty from the beginning. Online storage isn't infallible either - some web hosting companies lose their backups and suffer fatal data losses despite what they might tell you.

My "critical data" is my MP3 collection, sample collection, VST collection, record label data, and Butter Party tunes + projects. Anything else I can get by without or reacquire without too much trouble.

[deviant]

this really works...

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

I've used when my drive crashed

[a1studmuffin]

Dan: Works some of the time... depends what actually happened... some physical injuries to a drive are permanent.

[marcus]

Thanks for the ideas. Finding it a bit difficult to find a program that runs off mac, so waiting for the housemate to get back with his pc laptop so I can give this a go. Luckily all my tunes and samples up to early last year are on my old harddrive - makes it not so bad...

[huge]

use disc warrior for mac

or rip the drive out and put it into a pc and run spinrite over it.

ftw.

[fooishbar]

if you ever have any kind of data loss (deleted something you shouldn't have, drive died, whatever), UNPLUG THE DRIVE IMMEDIATELY. if it's your desktop or laptop, just yank the cord and don't even do normal shutdown. the more often you access the disk, the less chance you have of ever seeing your data again.

[a1studmuffin]

just yank the cord and don't even do normal shutdown

I hope you're not talking about the power cord. Hard cutting the power to a hard disk can cause permanent bad sectors if the disk platter is being written to at the time. I think it'd be enough to "eject" the drive through the proper means then switch it off...

[fooishbar]

just yank the cord and don't even do normal shutdown

I hope you're not talking about the power cord. Hard cutting the power to a hard disk can cause permanent bad sectors if the disk platter is being written to at the time. I think it'd be enough to "eject" the drive through the proper means then switch it off...

i do mean power cord, yeah. usb's good too.

if pulling the power resulted in the arm going crashing into the disk, that'd be bad, but i'm fairly sure it doesn't, or every blackout would result in everyone having physically destroyed disks, right? i'm pretty sure that when power's lost, the default magnetic configuration is to push the arm as far away from the platter as possible.

anyway, the rationale behind all this is don't write anything else to the disk. if you've deleted shit and yank the plug, if you're lucky then the 'delete these files' bits won't have got written out to disk, and you definitely won't have overwritten the space previously used for your most important files with random bollocks. if you want your files back, you want to absolutely minimise the number of writes to disk since deletion: every write is potentially trashing your data and making it a hell of a lot harder to recover.

[a1studmuffin]

Maybe you're right, although I thought it was likely that in the event of a blackout, you'd end up with some unrecoverable bad sectors (even with a full format) on a disk if it was writing. Not always visible immediately either - you might need to do a full surface scan of the drive to find the damage. I could be wrong - I'm sure current hard drives are a lot better at dealing with this problem...

[fooishbar]

yeah, old disks weren't quite as tolerant, but with new ones (i.e. last 10+ years) they tend to have fail-safes where a loss of power immediately forces the arm away from the platters, magnetically.

[nic]

is it safe to buy a 1tb drive or should i stick with 750gb?

[fooishbar]

stick with 750gb, the 1tb ones haven't been cleared by the fda as being safe for human consumption. may cause black holes and/or charlie the unicorn imo.