Posted: Tue Oct 31, 2006 7:47 pm Post subject: CATASTROPHE
Hi everyone.
Worst nightmare finally came true- I knew it was coming, just never knew when.
40 gigs of my artwork has been corrupted. Nothing is retrieving my .psd or .jpeg files. Tried all the recovery software, file viewers, etc. It's toast.
I'm an illustrator by trade and have officially lost over a year of client work, personal work and everything else. Approximately 3,800 files worth of .psd, .jpeg, .bmp is finished.
It doesn't matter which file I attempt to load, it gives me either a "truncated" kind of error or "invalid Photoshop file" sort of error.
File sizes are all ok, modification info and all that are fine. They are just all toasted.
Here's what happened:
1. Bought a new Western Digitial 250 Gig SATA hard drive, 16 meg buffer.
2. formatted the drive into 3 partitions.
3. drag/dropped all my art files from my older 160gig IDE drive into the last 2 partitions of this new SATA drive. Also drag/dropped all my backup .exe/setup files along with the art files. these exe and setup files are my programs (photoshop, winamp, soundforge, etc.) . the first partition on this new drive is where I installed another copy of XP.
4. formatted the older 160gig drive completely and booted XP off the new drive which now also contains all my art files and exe/setup files in the other 2 partitions.
5. tried to install all those .exe/setup files to get my software up and running again. my system doesn't recognize any of them.
6. retreived my CD collection and installed my programs from those instead of the exe/setup files. works fine.
7. photoshop cannot read a single, solitary .psd or .jpeg file from my new 250gig hard drive now. truncated errors or invalid errors.
8. Can't retrieve the art files from the older 160gig because I formatted it.
9. corruption errors, program failures and crashes are now burying me constantly in every aspect of my computer. I'm surprised I can even post this right now. This system is falling apart like I have never seen before.
9. I'm screwed.
The bright side- I backed up the majority of my data this past summer onto DVD and was able to retrieve close to 95% of what I need today. I have permanently lost past client's work, but will never require it again anyways. I was able to retrieve my most precious portfolio work off of these discs, save for a peice or two which I can re-do.
Even DVD is a joke- I keep hitting 'cyclic redundancy errors' when trying to pull some data off of the discs. This is simply an unreliable backup source, but I got lucky here.
I lost a current job to this failure and now have to explain to a client that I need to re-do the whole thing because of this catastrophe. That's really the only bad thing here. The rest of the lost data was using up hard drive space and was stuff I'd probably never even look at again anyways.
***I CANNOT STRESS THE IMPORTANCE OF BACKING UP UP ALL YOUR FILES ON A REGULAR BASIS*****
If I wasn't smart enough to predict a major disaster this past summer, I'd probably be dead by my own hands right now. I would have lost years worth of precious work.
now, judgung by the above sequence of events here, can anyone figure out what has caused this major disaster for me?
Joined: 23 Nov 2004
Posts: 1478
Location: Swansea UK
Posted: Wed Nov 01, 2006 4:19 am Post subject:
Even though your original drive has been formatted try getting it professionally recovered, it can be done, I knew somwbody who had his drive formatted and he got prety much everything back (by experts though) might be worth a try, check the price first. Wayne
Joined: 14 Feb 2003
Posts: 11945
Location: Harbinger, NC, U.S.A.
Posted: Wed Nov 01, 2006 8:01 am Post subject:
Yeah, that's what I was going to say, as well. Disconnect the 160 GB one and don't do anything to it - you can send it to a data recovery firm. But, it can be costly. Perhaps it's not worth it since you got most of the work back, etc.
Posted: Mon Dec 11, 2006 11:57 am Post subject: advice about backing up data
I think the best way to backup data is another hard drive. I keep a second drive in the case, but I only connect it when I am doing a back up, so it will last forever.
External USB drives are good, just test it to make sure other computers can read the data you copy onto it. I copied data from a laptop onto an older USB 1 external drive, and my PC couldnt open any of the files. Same issue you had.
I also suggest not storing data on the same hard drive that contains the OS. At least put data on a different partition. That way if you have to format the C partition to get a clean OS install, you data is safe...
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