So, here's the story,...the other day, my computer crashed (blue screen). I leave my external harddrive (Maxtor One Touch) hooked up to my laptop all the time so that I can manualy backup the photos that I want. Anyway, when I turned my computer back on, I was prompted to do a file check. It was taking forever so I decided to leave it and go about my other business. When I returned, the computer was on and seemed fine. Later that day, I went to retrieve a few photos from the backup to find that somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of my files were missing. I can only assume that they were erased when the computer crashed or during the file check because the photos were there the day before. Here's the real kicker, one of my clients never ordered pics or a CD and now she wants to do so!! I have to recover these pictures!! I unplugged the backup so nothing can be written over the files just in case there is a way to recover them. Geek Squad charges around $250 and Maxtor (Seaquest) charges about $125 dollars. What other options do I have? Any suggestions?? :0(
Pick up a second hard drive to move the photos to, then download and run recuva. http://www.filehippo.com/download_recuva/ It's free and it does a great job of recovering files.
Don't use the same hard drive as the destination location for recovering files since it may start overwriting deleted files as it recovers and you may loose some files.
One thing I always preach is multiple copies of any file you ever want to keep. I'm sitting here at home in front of two computers - one a desktop and one laptop. Some important files are kept on both (they're networked so I can synch whenever I want). Also, the desktop has two external hard drives attached - a 250 gb and a 1 terabyte. Photos get downloaded off my camera directly to the 1 TB - it's the newest drive, so in theory the most stable. Photos are kept on the SD card as long as possible, and purged only when I have room for less than 50 photos remaining. And then once a month, all of the photos get backed up onto the 250 gb drive as well.
I'm actually looking for a third drive, probably a portable external in the 1 or 1.5 terabyte range, that will go to work with me. Once a week (or month) the drive will come home with me, and back up my important files and photos, and then go back to the office. That way, I have multiple backup copies of every file, and one of those copies is off-site in case my house should catch fire or be robbed.
Overkill? Probably. But it's a heck of a safeguard against data loss.
I highly recommend some sort of off-site backup. I recently moved to CrashPlan and I am happy with it. http://www.crashplan.com/
$50/year for unlimited backup. Even with an external drive you are vulnerable to theft, power surge, flood, meteor, etc. With automatic off-site backups you have another layer of protection.
I've had good luck with PhotoRec, which is free. That said, the best bet is probably to get someone knowledgeable in data recovery to do it. Ideally you should mount the drive read-only and make an image of it to work from.
@sudweeks@yungingr@taidster@mallocarray@paulv --Thanks for everyones suggestions! I have devised a few ways to try and avoid ever being in this situation again, which includes multiple backups! I don't want to ever have to go through this again! This is day 12 of this nightmare and I can now breath a little easier and say that I just (literally 30 minutes ago) recoverd my photos! I am so thrilled,.. it is like the weight of the world has been lifted off of my shoulders! Clients CD is now being burnt and will be delivered tomorrow!
I used Zero Assumption Recovery. It took forever! I actually had to run it a few times because my desktop kept over heating! But in the end it worked and I'm thrilled and thankful!
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Don't use the same hard drive as the destination location for recovering files since it may start overwriting deleted files as it recovers and you may loose some files.
I'm actually looking for a third drive, probably a portable external in the 1 or 1.5 terabyte range, that will go to work with me. Once a week (or month) the drive will come home with me, and back up my important files and photos, and then go back to the office. That way, I have multiple backup copies of every file, and one of those copies is off-site in case my house should catch fire or be robbed.
Overkill? Probably. But it's a heck of a safeguard against data loss.
$50/year for unlimited backup. Even with an external drive you are vulnerable to theft, power surge, flood, meteor, etc. With automatic off-site backups you have another layer of protection.
I used Zero Assumption Recovery. It took forever! I actually had to run it a few times because my desktop kept over heating! But in the end it worked and I'm thrilled and thankful!