Chips' Fun House ~ View topic

Digital photography can kiss my... I just lost hundreds of pics because one of our comps kicked the bucket. Me, being broke, of course didnt bother paying for the cd's or external drive or anything else to back them up with. Theres no way to get them back. If there was, my bro would know.

One of the pics I lost was taken with a Macros lens (for those who know what that is) of a spider just about to take down a bee.

I'll never have a chance to get a shot like that again. Ever.

I'm a moron and digital photography sucks. I'm going back to film.

Tell me I'm not the only one who's done stupid stuff like this...

Which part of your computer died? Because if it was any part other than the harddrive, then your pics are still on there, and can be recovered by putting it in another machine.

If it was the harddrive that died, then I'm sorry to hear that. Crying or Very sad

P.S. If you're broke, wouldn't paying for film be a problem as well?

Forum Trolls Joined: 26 Apr 2007 Posts: 14 Location: FL

Also, depending on what you mean by a dead hard drive.. You may be able to get some or all of the data back.. If the drive still spins up you may have a pretty good chance of saving the files. You can check out www.ubcd4win.com for some info on a possible route. If the drive isn't spinning up, you still may be able to get the data retrieved, but may cost a bunch of cash..

DA is right also about putting the drive in a known good system as a slave.

That really, really sucks.

Forum Scout Joined: 30 Jun 2005 Posts: 86 Location: Texas

You are NOT the only one this has happened to.

Save the "dead" hard drive. Even if you can't afford it now, the folks who specialize in recovering data from "dead" disks can do amazing things. You may yet have that spider image back.

I also have some "once in a lifetime" shots that I would hate to lose. But being a computer professional, I know not to trust the evil little boxes.

DVD / CD burning sounds good on paper, but its a hassle so you never get to it. An external USB drive big enough to back up the whole system should be part of everybodies computer budget. Figure about $100 for a drive large enough for most folks stuff. No thinking, no sorting, just back it ALL up. Even if you only do it a few times a year, it can save a lot of your stuff.

make sure ya pick a good corner

Forum H4xor Joined: 21 Dec 2004 Posts: 1164

Chick, I've had a dilemma of the same (if not worse) proportion. I may have told this story already, but I really don't remember. I bought a 500 gig external harddrive from Newegg, 500 gigs of external space was like wow. I finally condensed all of my files from floppy disk, cd, zip disks, etc into one final end-all solution that was small and portable. Files I had saved from years and years past, old assignments, pics, music, videos, you name it, I had it all backed up. It was all scattered up until this point and I was elated when my dream solution finally came into fruition. I however got completely ****ed over by some hand of fate, and alas, all of my files I had worked so hard to protect over the years, had disapeared in the blink of an eye. To correct the problem I simply sent it back (for a hefty shipping fee of course) to newegg for a new one, and so I got what I wanted, but again, after trying to rebuild once more the same fate plagued me a second time, and I was again completely ****ed over by a faulty harddrive. The third time I sent it back directly to Seagate itself and got the replacement that I'm using even today. I'm still waiting for that day, however, when this drive malfunctions and I will be at ground zero once more! Basically, there is no such thing as a full proof backup, or at least I haven't found it. Even if I had made backups of my backups, they still could have and/or would have failed at some point. The problem of backing up files in a full-proof way without a lot of fuss really leaves me scratching my head at times. I thought we had progressed enough as a society, that we would be thinking of full-proof methods to solve problems, but again I am reminded of the fact that we live in a capitalist society where we design things to break so that consumers like me can get the shaft once more, and have to knuckle down and buy more s**t. HOORAY! Mad

Well I've recovered some of my favorites. including a smaller version of the spider one. (thank heavens) They were saved in random places on other computers and things.

I dont know the techy jargon to explain it but what it breaks down to is that the info was lost before the system restore happened. Short of sending it away with thousands of dollars its GONE. My bro does this kind of thing for a living and has tried everything he can. It sucks but I guess its a learning experience.

I guess I'll have to go monastery hopping again this spring to get all those pics retaken. Smile

At least I know I'm not alone in this kind of buffoonery. XO guys. (except falcon, because he fails at comforting teh chick) Wink

lol, sorry chick i just couldn't resist Razz

I don't know how it happened or the cause in this instance, but we all need this reminder to take better care of our digital stock.

You begin to realize that pictures you stored on a disk years ago may still be there, but for how long? What if that one disk became damaged?

I recently had some issues with my drive making "whining" sounds...and a click or two every now and then. Those are almost always a sign of impending failure. I ran right out and bought another drive and backed everything up. The drive has yet to fail again though after running some disk utilities to make sure all was good. I had been lax in backing up my stuff and could have lost a great deal.

I feel bad for teh chick...but thanks for bringing this up and reminding everyone to stay on their digital toes. Cool

*Last edited by Mr. Happy on Tue Mar 04, 2008 6:03 pm; edited 1 time in total*

Type Hard Drive Recovery in a search engine. You mail your HD to them, they analyze and print out everything on the drive and send you a list. You tell them what you want off the drive - last time I checked it was 300 bucks if you don't want the OS and program. That's not unreasonable.

They either pack the files up on a CD or set up a password protected FTP site for you (after you pay them) to download your stuff.

Don't cry Chick <3

active@ recovery ftw, I had a HD that was inaccessible and I was able to recover 60gigs of movie Razz