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Data Loss

edited June 2008 in Technology
Today I lost over half of my music and my Steam games and save files. I'm trying to take it in stride, since I know it can all be regained. It's just going to take a while. I'm just glad I didn't lose anything truly important.

Help ease my pain and spin your yarns of data loss, be it of hard drive failure or the stupidity of yourself or others.

Comments

  • My uncle told me this once: "There are two kinds of computer users. Those who have lost data, and those who have not yet lost data."

    I had a big hard drive crash once, but didn't lose anything important. I did once accidentally format a digital camera memory card, and lost all the pictures of the cats when they were kittens. My girlfriend was crushed.

    I'm so paranoid about losing my work data that I have a batch file that I use to back it up to an external hard drive every hour or so, and I upload it to a server every night.
  • Hard drive failure. Before I had this computer we only had one computer in the house, my little brother and I used it. Since that resulted in some annoyances, my little brother bought a Dell for himself (Wanting to use it for gaming, it having an integrated video card). So I got the old computer. A short time after having said computer for myself, the hard drive failed. Which sucked. So I was forced to buy a new computer, luckily there was a sale at a local computer shop and I bought some decent stuff there for a nice price, NVidia 6200, P4 3Ghz, 160 gig SATA. Assembled the new computer, threw my Windows XP OEM version on it (yes it works perfectly), connected the dead HD, copied all the music from my F: partition and my other stuff from the other partitions and failed to get my school documents. Since these were on my C: partition, which was the goner. I did manage to recover some/most of it, but nothing noteworthy. I still have the HD I think.

    Good luck with the restoration of your data.
  • Everybody knows it. Get some external backup drives, and get a JungleDisk.
  • Possibly dead hard drive, although I should hope not since I only built this thing three months ago. I can feel the hard drive vibrating and I've checked all the connections boot lists but it still fails.
  • Does the drive show up in the BIOS? If it does then you may still be able to recover data from it. If it's not even recognized by the BIOS then you're pretty much up the proverbial brown creek without a bladed propulsion device.
  • edited May 2009
    This HD is fucked. Which is retarded since I only bought it in February. Don't buy Seagate Barracudas.

    [Edit] Now I'm reading about a hundred cases from people who's Barracudas also failed in three months time.
    Post edited by Sail on
  • This HD is fucked. Which is retarded since I only bought it in February. Don't buy Seagate Barracudas.

    [Edit] Now I'm reading about a hundred cases from people who's Barracudas also failed in three months time.
    That might have been that one specific model that had problems, and needed a firmware update. There was a huge news about it all over the Internets. Overall, Seagate drives are actually probably the best to go with. It was just one batch that was bad, and was fixable if you paid attention. What was the model number of the drive?
  • I have a terabyte hard drive...

    About 120 Gigs was a backup partition, and the rest was FULL of data. It fell from a high place (my fault). It seems the backup partition is where the badness is, so I think I might be able to spinrite the rest and transfer it to a new hard drive. This is happening tomorrow.

    Yikes I don't want to lose my data.
  • edited May 2009
    That might have been that one specific model that had problems, and needed a firmware update. There was a huge news about it all over the Internets. Overall, Seagate drives are actually probably the best to go with. It was just one batch that was bad, and was fixable if you paid attention. What was the model number of the drive?
    It's the exact model that had the defect, according to Seagate, and I'm supposedly entitled to a free data recovery. I'm going through the support system now.

    I did get that hard drive per your recommendation. Not that it's your fault, because I think you recommended it before the news fully hit and I haven't paid attention to tech news for over half a year, but I definitely didn't feel like I needed to research something that you said was A-OK.

    Oh well. I'll get my files back and buy a JungleDisk to prevent this headache from ever happening again.
    Post edited by Sail on
  • So far I've never had a HD fail on me. I was paranoid about an old laptop's HD failing, so about a year and a half ago I bought a Western Digital MyBook external harddrive. It's nice, but the passports that WD has recently came out with are so much nice and sleeker than the MyBook.

    Since then I have a backup of all my files from all the computers around the house on that drive.
  • I've had two HD failures, both of which were in the space of a couple of months. I lost a whole lot of music, two Half-Life 2 level I was working on, and a 50,000 words novel. Thankfully I wasn't too attached to those things, but I've learned my lesson.
  • What the hell, people?!?! Isn't this a geek forum? Get on this shit!

    The other day I screwed up and lost 12gig of video files. You know what I did? Restored the files from a backup I made 20 minutes before. I could throw my laptop off a bridge today, buy a new one tomorrow and only lose a few hours work. Id have to try Realy Hard to lose any important data. And I'm not even a computer geek!
  • What the hell, people?!?! Isn't this a geek forum? Get on this shit!
    Second that!

    Over the years, I have had roughly 10% of my drives fail before they become too small and get replaced. This is just something you can't avoid, so prepare for it and back shit up.
  • What the hell, people?!?! Isn't this a geek forum? Get on this shit!
    My excuse is that I was 14 at the time, and didn't even know what an external HD was.
  • ......
    edited June 2009
    People panicking about the order of miniature magnetized areas on some metal, how droll.

    Oh, and Luke, how badly must you screw up to lose 12 GIGABYTES of video that require external backups to be restored? Just vanilla deleting 12 GB takes time.
    Post edited by ... on
  • edited June 2009
    Oh, and Luke, how badly must you screw up to lose 12 GIGABYTES of video that require external backups to be restored? Just vanilla deleting 12 GB takes time.
    I was using iMovie.

    EDIT: Specifically, I was clearing out clips that I no longer need on a project that I'm continually editing (will be finished at the end of the year). Going through, selecting each one, rejecting it, then sending rejected clips to the trash was taking ages. I had to be really careful because I've not found a way to "un-reject" a clip.

    So instead I used the "send all unused clips to trash. This not only sent all unused clips to the trash, it also sent EVERY SINGLE FRAME I wasn't using on the clips I WAS using to the trash. This meant I was only left with the exact length of clips I was using, and not a frame more. How am I meant to edit by only shortening clips?

    However, I only found out iMovie worked like this AFTER I did it. And I couldn't find a way to undo it, or get imovie to re-accept the movie out of the trash. So I restored 12GB of movie data by Time Machine.
    Post edited by Luke Burrage on
  • Once I was installing Fedora and the installer decided to format all the external drives connected to my computer. The two externals had everything including family photos. It took me 2 days to recover all the data...
  • Once I was installing Fedora and the installer decided to format all the external drives connected to my computer. The two externals had everything including family photos. It took me 2 days to recover all the data...
    The installer wont' format anything unless you tell it to.
  • The installer wont' format anything unless you tell it to.
    Well I didn't explicitly tell it to, the installer had the disaster set up and I was careless and just pressed next. Now I always have my externals unplugged while doing anything.
  • The installer wont' format anything unless you tell it to.
    Well I didn't explicitly tell it to, the installer had the disaster set up and I was careless and just pressed next. Now I always have my externals unplugged while doing anything.
    Oh, it got the externals. Snaps.
  • However, I only found out iMovie worked like this AFTER I did it. And I couldn't find a way to undo it, or get imovie to re-accept the movie out of the trash. So I restored 12GB of movie data by Time Machine.
    Aaah, I was imagining something with a file manager. Crazy iMovie.
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