06Aug Hard drive failure.
Hard drive failure is a pain and although I back up drives regularly, sometimes I get lazy. Case in point, the hard drive above (Seagate momentus XT) was backed up 3 months ago. I normally try to run backups on my laptop drives at least once a month, but I was on the road the last few months and kind of forgot about it. Thankfully I save all of my footage and photos to a portable raid 1 drive when i’m on the road. The bad thing is that I saved the last 8 or so project files I was working on to the drive above and now the work on those projects is reset to zero.
I still have all of my footage, but the time lines that were lost represent about 40 hours worth of work. Which means I’ll have to spend most of next week re editing. Basically the moral of the store is, if you don’t already, BACK YOUR DATA UP!
One thing that makes it easier for me to back up my laptop drive is to use an SATA drive docking station, they run about $25 and you can easily drop in either a 2.5 or 3.5 hard drive. I’ve had good luck using Norton Ghost but there are a number of free options on the market. Drop a spare drive in, press a button, and go to bed. In the morning you have a full back up of your drive that’s ready to be dropped in to your laptop should the event arise. After this little fiasco, I’ll probably stay on top of things for 6 or 8 months, but it’s easy to forget about it and slack off.
August 7th, 2011 at 3:48 am
Hi! it was very unfortunate to happen to you. 🙁
If you are (still) using FCP, i can share a trick that i use for the final cut project files… i have all of them in on of my DropBox folders!
That way whenever i am online i have automatic backup.
I use it also to have some versioning (DropBox feature) and if i have the same media on my desktop computer i can even edit on another computer and so the timeline work is always on the some place.
Hope this trick helps you (in the future) too. 😉
I like reading your blog! Thanks for writing it! 🙂
Regards!
August 8th, 2011 at 8:04 am
I don’t know the nature of the failure but as someone who handles terabytes of data for two small business I have to say Spinrite is a terrific product. (http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm)
Based on both personal experience and hearing many testimonials, this product can bring back many many drives from the edge long enough to recover data, or in many cases, to simply continue working on non-critical roles.
It’s a tiny file that can boot off of its own ISO or a USB stick. It more than paid for itself the first time i used it and I now continue to use it in a maintenance capacity.
August 9th, 2011 at 8:50 am
First, thanks for the great info you provide (and your noob store where I bought some stuff from 🙂
Second, sorry to hear about you hard drive problem. When I saw your comments, I though immediately about the spinrite product (I heard about it on one of my favorite “Security Now” podcast). Just wanted to share the advise with you – but… funny.. somebody already beat me to it.
Anyhow, I second the opinion about spinrite – definitely a great tool..
August 9th, 2011 at 9:05 pm
I plan to download spinrite and give it a try. The stuff I’ve lost is well worth the $89 price tag if it works.