PHNL Scenery: Cancelled

[Colin S]

I'm sorry that this isn't under scenery development, but I feel that it is important enough.

 

This morning, I opened my computer to find the following hell awaiting me: My entire 1TB external hard drive has been formatted in error by my computer. I have lost every single photo I have ever taken; every payware I have ever purchased is now in oblivion. Over 300GB of raw footage for a film that I have been working on for three years is lost. This is the absolute worst day of my life, about as close to your house burning down and loosing your citizenship as you can get for a teenager. 

 

Currently, I am running over twenty different disk recovery applications. If they find that anything is still there, I won't be using them to recover it - I will send it off, no matter what the price, to a professional rcovery service. I'd like to as a favour of this community, perhaps the last favour I've ever asked: Has anyone else experience this kind of trouble before and what company did you use to recover your files?

 

Among the files lost are:

300GB of film

290GB of photos

110GB of X-Plane 9 files

100GB of X-Plane 10 files

25GB of academic work

 

This essentially stops development indefinitely, and not by choice this time. PHNL, despite the anticipation I got of how amazing I could create a scenery, has vanished off the face of the earth. I have the source files still, all the orthoimagery, but it took three days just to align them correctly to the X-Plane scenery.

 

This pretty much represents the end of my possiblity for applying to film, art, or graphic design school, as every single possible item in my portfolio is gone.

 

You can get irritated and tell me, "why didn't you back it up?" Well, I can tell you why. I haven't enough money to buy a SECOND 1TB drive. I will be going in debt to get one VERY SOON now that I have experienced this.

 

At least I have something to be happy about, my friend is taking me flying today in his 150. That will be fun.

 

Wish me luck,

Colin Stepney

Pacific Northwest Scenery Project

[Cameron]

Sadly, recovery services are not cheap *at all* and trump the cost of a second drive.

 

Sorry you had to go through this, Colin. That's a major setback and one I can sympathize with.

[Colin S]

Sadly, recovery services are not cheap *at all* and trump the cost of a second drive.

 

Sorry you had to go through this, Colin. That's a major setback and one I can sympathize with.

 

No matter what the price, I don't care. I need this stuff back, a lot of it is necessary for graduation.

[Nicola_M]

Really sorry to hear that, Colin. I'm with Cameron; recovery services are definitely not cheap, and no guarantee that they can fully recover all work lost, as I understand it. The only real way of avoiding loss is multiple backups in case one goes corrupt.

I've only had a 500GB external drive go corrupt on me, now I keep copies of everything important on a series of CDs/DVDs, now I know how easy it is for external drives to go up in smoke.

[scubajuan_new]

I had experienced lost volumes and found a utility that with a lot of patience help me recover most of my files. this was for mac. The software was not too expensive and basically made a sector by sector. If the format was a normal format, meaning that it just erased the partition table, the data is still there. The problem is that later i got broken into my home and my computer and my wife's computer got stolen, along with my backup drive that was plugged into the lap top and there was no recovery for that. The name is:

Stellar Phoenix

good luck

[Sgt R Lee Ermey]

This reminds me of the joke about Jesus vs Satan in a computer war. 

 

Moral of the story.. backup your stuff. 

[ksgy]

http://kurt-security.com/

 

They're the best in europe. Maybe they can help to find near your location. Even they can't, you can send them your hard drive to recover data.

 

Hope this helps and good luck!

[Mike Hotel]

Oh, bad.

 

It all depends on the method of formatting. What did "the computer" do? Initialize? Easiest recovery. Formatting overwriting the existing data makes it harder. One run might be OK, industrial spy-safe would be running it 3 to 5 times plus.

 

So chances are good if you fall into the easier categories. But dont write any data to that drive. Make sure you know what happened and ask a couple of recovery services for advise before you try stupid things yourself.

 

And, well, for recovery you need another TB drive...

 

Good luck!

[greggerm]

• One drive in the computer acts as the live, "production" drive.
• Another drive in the computer as a hot backup for my data, getting daily updates.
• A third drive (external) which is updated every month or so remains offsite... just in case.

I've had hard drives die on me, and I've even lived through an apartment fire (*rat bastard neighbor falling asleep smoking) - haven't lost one bit of important data in a decade.

 

If the data on your computer is truly important to you, a strong backup plan for your home computer data is quite a cheap insurance policy.... especially in this day and age of digital family photos. This is something you don't often think about until it's too late, as Colin is now understanding.

 

Learn from his situation. Back up your data.

[Dozer]

This really sucks Colin. I really hope you're able to recover all the data, and without severe difficulty.

[Flying_pig]

This is the absolute worst day of my life, about as close to your house burning down and loosing your citizenship as you can get for a teenager. 

 

Being a teenager i would consider that a understatement, also, if you still have the source files is there any way you could make the project open source? Also The true moral of the story here is unplug external hard drives at night

[Goran_M]

I feel for you, Colin.  Same thing happened to me with the 747.  Luckily, i had most of my files saved in dropbox as ghost images and was able to retrieve them.  

Not meaning to make this sound like an "I told you so!", but if you're going to make something for X-Plane, or anything else, you need a back up drive or some other kind of backup (cloud).  Not doing so is like swinging on a trapeze without a net.  

Best of luck in getting your stuff back.

[Colin S]

I feel for you, Colin.  Same thing happened to me with the 747.  Luckily, i had most of my files saved in dropbox as ghost images and was able to retrieve them.  

Not meaning to make this sound like an "I told you so!", but if you're going to make something for X-Plane, or anything else, you need a back up drive or some other kind of backup (cloud).  Not doing so is like swinging on a trapeze without a net.  

Best of luck in getting your stuff back.

 

I'm going out tomorrow to buy two new 1TB drives for exactly that purpose, recommended to me by a friend who's in computer security (like REALLY HIGH UP). He keeps one in a safety deposit box.

[Flying_pig]

i would by a 2tb instead you can get a high quality one for $130

[Andyrooc]

@mj, I think the whole point is to 2 drives....or do you mean 2 x 2TB drives?

[Flying_pig]

I meant 2x2tb

[JimboG]

Colin,

I work in IT Security.

If your drive has been formatted then you have lost the partition table, but most likely not the data on the sectors on the rest of the drive.

There are a few tools you can use that are not intrusive on the drive that you can use to "scan" the sectors and essentially reconstitute files that are still there.....

So.... Don't do anything rash, I can recommend a couple of tools for you to try and use, one is quite simple and can be used directly from Windows (I am assuming that this drive is an external, I think you said that in your OP) and another is a boot-from-CD tool that can do a much deeper scan of the sectors.

The moral of the story is, it's amazing what you can recover, especially when you know where to look - and you do - its your data.

The first thing to ask is: did you do a "quick" format, or did you do a 7x forensic format? (I am assuming the former, especially if it was an accident?)

So don't panic too much just yet, you've got the drive, and it hasn't been crushed by a press - so you've still got your data, most likely.

Cheers

James

[Colin S]

Colin,

I work in IT Security.

If your drive has been formatted then you have lost the partition table, but most likely not the data on the sectors on the rest of the drive.

There are a few tools you can use that are not intrusive on the drive that you can use to "scan" the sectors and essentially reconstitute files that are still there.....

So.... Don't do anything rash, I can recommend a couple of tools for you to try and use, one is quite simple and can be used directly from Windows (I am assuming that this drive is an external, I think you said that in your OP) and another is a boot-from-CD tool that can do a much deeper scan of the sectors.

The moral of the story is, it's amazing what you can recover, especially when you know where to look - and you do - its your data.

The first thing to ask is: did you do a "quick" format, or did you do a 7x forensic format? (I am assuming the former, especially if it was an accident?)

So don't panic too much just yet, you've got the drive, and it hasn't been crushed by a press - so you've still got your data, most likely.

Cheers

James

 

Thanks James! I've already started a recovery of the files, but it's going to take quite a while with the size of this drive. It was a quick format, the kind I use for my memory cards on my camera to rid them of stuff. And about being crushed by a press - yeah, I have a friend who kind of crushed his hard drive under a car wheel and he got 100% of his data back.

 

Thanks for the suggestion What are these programs?

Edited January 20, 2013 by Colin S

[JimboG]

Hi Colin,

The Windows-based tool for quick and easy discovery of "deleted" files is called "Recuva" - this is quite a simple tool to use but it does rely somewhat on the partition table and what state it is in - which in your case depends on the type of format used and how similar to the previous structure it is now.

This tool is handy for a first hit, and certainly does the job for those careless "oops" moments when cleaning up files!

As for the deeper scan, there is a fantastic tool known as "Hiren's CD" - this is an .iso burn-to-CD-R effort which when booted gives you access to a collection of tools that will run out of a RAM disk and therefore doesn't write *anything* to your (sick) disk.

One of those tools on that CD in particular I have used many times before that will quite literally scan every sector (including doing its best with bad sectors) and working out what files are there and what it can bring back from the dead onto another medium that you've got plugged in (external USB HD for example)

I have restored literally terabytes of data that have been presumed lost forever.... I won't go into any further detail due to the sort of work I do but trust me, it can be done.

External recovery companies can cost an absolute fortune (£1K per day!) depending on how sophisticated they are, and it can take weeks to get your data back. I am not saying for one minute that nobody should not use them, I am merely stating that people don't realise how much it can cost sometimes, especially as time goes on.

If you get to the stage of booting Hiren's CD and have a number of tools to choose from let me know and I'll point you in the right direction if you still need help getting your data back from your drive.

No charge. :-)

Cheers

James

[Colin S]

Hi Colin,

The Windows-based tool for quick and easy discovery of "deleted" files is called "Recuva" - this is quite a simple tool to use but it does rely somewhat on the partition table and what state it is in - which in your case depends on the type of format used and how similar to the previous structure it is now.

This tool is handy for a first hit, and certainly does the job for those careless "oops" moments when cleaning up files!

As for the deeper scan, there is a fantastic tool known as "Hiren's CD" - this is an .iso burn-to-CD-R effort which when booted gives you access to a collection of tools that will run out of a RAM disk and therefore doesn't write *anything* to your (sick) disk.

One of those tools on that CD in particular I have used many times before that will quite literally scan every sector (including doing its best with bad sectors) and working out what files are there and what it can bring back from the dead onto another medium that you've got plugged in (external USB HD for example)

I have restored literally terabytes of data that have been presumed lost forever.... I won't go into any further detail due to the sort of work I do but trust me, it can be done.

External recovery companies can cost an absolute fortune (£1K per day!) depending on how sophisticated they are, and it can take weeks to get your data back. I am not saying for one minute that nobody should not use them, I am merely stating that people don't realise how much it can cost sometimes, especially as time goes on.

If you get to the stage of booting Hiren's CD and have a number of tools to choose from let me know and I'll point you in the right direction if you still need help getting your data back from your drive.

No charge. :-)

Cheers

James

 

I'll be honest about recuva: I have never been impressed with it. I used to be in film class, and whenever other dolts wiped your memory card, you would have to get the stuff back, and the only one I knew of what recuva. It drove me insane, I never got back my files. I'll check out Hiren's CD, though, although I noticed that it has recuva on it. Are there any other recovery programs onboard?

 

EDIT: Actually, I thought I'd let you know this: I used recuva, it recognized the drive as... empty. I purchased a $99.00 from SeaGate (coincidentally my drive is seagate) and so far, although it's taken over 8 hours, it has found over 10000 of my 10000+ pictures, and tons of other files... Recuva gave me a blank page.

Edited January 20, 2013 by Colin S

[JimboG]

Hi Colin,

Indeed, Recuva's ability to detect "deleted" files depends on what it sees in the partition table - which in your case has been overwritten / blown away / edited. But it's free, and is ok for simple recoveries of accidentally deleted data.

The tool I have in mind on Hiren's CD isn't Recuva AFAIK. The CD has evolved over the years with some tools being dropped and some being added. I'll check tomorrow when I get in the office as to the name and version of the tool in question, and I'll have alook around at home, I might have it handy.

I've looked through the app listing of the current Hiren offering, I am not 100% convinced I see the app I have in mind.

I'll dig it out and confirm either way for you.

Cheers

James