Last night the external harddrive that holds all of my photos suddenly and completely stopped working. For no reason whatsoever.
So pretty much, if I can't recover it - all of my pictures EVER will be gone forever. A total and utter waste of the past few years of my life. I put a lot of time and work into those photographs. I am so heartbroken and almost in tears.
My friend is taking the drive tomorrow to see what he can do. I am hoping he can at least salvage the data. If not I am going to be devastated.
@kcphotography it may have just overheated so I would just unplug it let it cool off for a couple hours and then see if it operates also keep in mind if you have years of photo's the data can most likely be recovered however depending on who does this it can range anywhere from a couple hundred to even upwards to $1k but sometimes the simplest explanation i.e power supply for computers etc is the culprit so please do not give up hope....I know what you are feeling I dropped an external drive once :( and my wife's hardrive failed as well
This is why i backup EVERYTHING that i find to be in any way important 3x
On my webserver
External HD
Internal HD
btwn the three its next to impossible to lose my work. Though i never learned this the hard way, during my college studies plenty of people lost ALL their work at the last minute and nearly failed classes b/c of it. You can almost never trust a HD to last, especially if its getting old.
To give you some hope, you may not have lost everything. It is quite possible to recover data on failed HD, it just depends on what happened. If the internal disk of the drive is still intact a Computer tech can put it into another to try and recover the data. Buuuuut as others have suggested, this will cost you.... I used to work for the Geek Squad at best buy, i believe they offer a service like this but it was around ~$300 depending on how much data needed to be xfered. Its part of the data transfer service i believe or data backup (its been a while since i worked there)
Im sorry that you lost so much :[
At least you still have a little bit of it left on 365? It may not be full sized but its better then nothing at all..
You should never give up on Photography. Another thing that i learned in college was thru program crashes where id forgotten to save...... Though it sux, often times the second time around you do everything better AND faster. I know its not the same thing as losing a "precious moment" which isnt possible to just.. make again, but there will always be more of those moments to capture.
Im sorry for your loss, and i hope that it may be recovered :[
Most likely all is not lost and this should encourage you to take more photos and maybe even try some film. External hard drives have the memory written on them magnetically so when they die, it does not mean that all is lost. I also have a powerless external hard drive just for my photos that connects only through a usb. I hate the thought of losing memories so I have created albums through picasa and actually pay to have the additional memory so I can download my photos, which I had to do after my computer crashed.
Three quotes for you that I read today that may put it into perspective.
-Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow. – Imogen Cunningham
- Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. – Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop. – Ansel Adams
ACK!!!! That is awful. It should not deter you from taking pictures though. If anything, it's a good lesson for all of us on the need to keep backups. I don't think there is any easy solution. Even the negatives from film needs to be stored somewhere safe. I'm in the process of converting all my negatives this year. We have a 1 gig backup drive for the home pc and I'm slowly removing old pictures onto dvd's so I can have room for new pictures. I hope you can recover your photos.
i am so sorry...that happened to me once a few years back and i lost the first few years of my two oldest...luckily i was on a photo sharing website and had whatever albums i had put on there...still i did cry and was devestated...i still have the laptop and one day will try to see if i can salvage anything. i hope you are able to retrieve some of the data...i know that i now save my photos on disc every few months so i do not repeat that.
@loztsoul I left it and my laptop off last night (which I always do anyway) in hopes that that was just the case. But alas, it was not. I read somewhere that it could be the usb cord that Western Digital (the brand of mine) supplies. I tried different USB cords, shorter cords, etc, etc. You name it, I probably have tried it!
@miley89 That WAS my backup! But apparently my backups need backups!
@arrayofblues Thank you! That is exactly what I need!
@3nder Thank you for your kind words and encouragement. And that was my backup plan, but as I said above, I guess I need to backup my backups next time. Lesson learned! Hopefully it won't cost me all my pictures to have learned that. This drive isn't very old. I bought it last year and it sat in a cupboard up until a week ago, when I pulled it out after my laptop started acting squirrely.
For the computer savvy (which I am not) here is (hopefully) a shortened story of what happened and what I have tried thusfar.
I had a 750BG Western Digital External HDD thats about 3 years old. I have dropped it and beat on it relentlessly (not intentionally) and it is still going strong! It getting on the full side so a while back I decided to buy another drive. Since this one had been good to me, I went with another Western Digital. I kept this in a cupboard up until last week. My other drive is practically full now and my computer was acting up, so I backed everything to the new drive. Since then I have dropped it 2x. The second time the casing came apart. A half hour later I finally got it back together. (This one has pain-in-the-butt grip things on the side that make it a drag to get back in correctly.) I checked, everything worked fine and continued to use it. That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday I was using it, it worked fine, then suddenly it froze. I waited about 5 mins for it to respond. It didn't, so I forced it to close (Ctrl+Alt+Delete>Start Task Manager>End Task). I went back into Computer to open it back up again, it wasn't there. I unplugged it and tried again. Still nothing. Unplugged it, restarted the comp. Nothing. I unplugged everything and shut the comp down, let everything sit overnight. Restarted everything. Still nothing. Right-clicked Computer>Manage>Disk Management. The only information it gives for the drive is Disk 1 (Name), Unknown (drive letter), Unreadable (Contents). I was instructed to change the drive letter, but when you right-click the only options it gives is Properties and Help. So that lead was a bust. I also tried using different USB cables, ports, and computers. And taking it out of the enclosure incase something inside was blocking a connection somewhere. Still nothing. So that's where I'm at now. My friend will probably put the drive into a computer and use it as a slave. That's the only other thing I can think of. If I knew how, I would do it myself. If anyone has anything they think might help, I am all ears. I will try anything as long as it wont compromise any of the data. I am still slightly hopeful and wont give up until all of my sources say there is nothing left to do.
Thanks again to everyone for your support. It means a lot. I will let you know how things go.
@kcphotography If it is an external drive you may have only damaged the drive housing itself. A computer tech would be able to take it apart and access the drive inside the housing if it isnt busted. (Y youve said your friend was going to try using it as a slave, this may work if this is the case) Though i think that it is most likely that dropping it caused parts of the drive itself to stop functioning properly. HDs are VERY finicky they do not like to be dropped X.x im impressed the other one lasted as long as it did if you dropped it 2+ times (depending on from how high ofc)
Some data MAY have been lost if the disks were scratched..
If you can get a form of FLASH storage, which works different from an actual HD, i would recommend that instead. Flash storage is much more resilient to drops and falls as it doesnt have quite so many "working" parts to be broken.
Most Large size externals are not Flash storage. Camera memory cards or Pen drives are examples of flash storage.
And yes.... backups for your backups for your backups backups. Lol.
I didn’t see you mention online back-up tho? Most servers have redundant HDs in them (aka there are two drives that both hold the same data) making it difficult to ever lose the data. Also in the computer world… anything older then 2yrs is pretty old ;]
@3nder I have never used online backups. I have seen an ad on tv for one, but I am always scared that they may be a scam to take your personal info, so I never looked into one. My brother (another computer techie, the one who has told me what to try thusfar) just informed me that he has a 3TB online storage that I can use, so I might look into it.
And I know all too well about outdated computer stuff. I have a desktop, 2 laptops, a netbook, and a tablet (the things that look like mini iPads/Droids on Steroids). Each to replace the one before it. Haha.
Update: I tried using EASEUS Data Recovery. It found the HD, but couldn't find anything on it. Hoping that's not an omen for whats to come, but we'll see!
@kcphotography here is a shot in the dark based on the fact I use wd external drives and had a similiar issue...the wdsmartware the fires up when drive detects gets glitchy...if you are having that come up when you connect your wdexternal close that dialogue box and then go to your start menu and look for your wdsmartware program and launch it from there....that did the trick in my circumstance
@loztsoul My computer has this security feature that doesn't open those dialogue boxes when you plug stuff in. If you want to open something, you have to do it manually (through the start menu). Which is actually helpful since I am usually doing more than one thing at once and when I plug in HDs and SD cards, I'm usually not ready to use them quite yet. Or if I am, I am impatient and am halfway through the process of opening it, before the thing would even pop up. So I just kept it off.
Either way, when I go to Start>computer, the HD doesn't show up anywhere anymore, except for under Disk Managment. And even then, it has no information on it whatsoever and doesn't have a drive letter, nor will it let me assign it one.
UPDATE: My friend is working on the drive now. He's says its not looking too good. He was hoping it was just the connector, so he pulled mine off and put it on another drive. That's working fine so its not that.
Guess I had better start saving up my pennies to take it to a pro to retrieve the data, if possible.
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I really hope they can fix it :/
On my webserver
External HD
Internal HD
btwn the three its next to impossible to lose my work. Though i never learned this the hard way, during my college studies plenty of people lost ALL their work at the last minute and nearly failed classes b/c of it. You can almost never trust a HD to last, especially if its getting old.
To give you some hope, you may not have lost everything. It is quite possible to recover data on failed HD, it just depends on what happened. If the internal disk of the drive is still intact a Computer tech can put it into another to try and recover the data. Buuuuut as others have suggested, this will cost you.... I used to work for the Geek Squad at best buy, i believe they offer a service like this but it was around ~$300 depending on how much data needed to be xfered. Its part of the data transfer service i believe or data backup (its been a while since i worked there)
Im sorry that you lost so much :[
At least you still have a little bit of it left on 365? It may not be full sized but its better then nothing at all..
You should never give up on Photography. Another thing that i learned in college was thru program crashes where id forgotten to save...... Though it sux, often times the second time around you do everything better AND faster. I know its not the same thing as losing a "precious moment" which isnt possible to just.. make again, but there will always be more of those moments to capture.
Im sorry for your loss, and i hope that it may be recovered :[
I hope you can get it fixed.
Three quotes for you that I read today that may put it into perspective.
-Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow. – Imogen Cunningham
- Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. – Henri Cartier-Bresson
- Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop. – Ansel Adams
@laceyjogautreau thank you!
@loztsoul I left it and my laptop off last night (which I always do anyway) in hopes that that was just the case. But alas, it was not. I read somewhere that it could be the usb cord that Western Digital (the brand of mine) supplies. I tried different USB cords, shorter cords, etc, etc. You name it, I probably have tried it!
@miley89 That WAS my backup! But apparently my backups need backups!
@arrayofblues Thank you! That is exactly what I need!
@3nder Thank you for your kind words and encouragement. And that was my backup plan, but as I said above, I guess I need to backup my backups next time. Lesson learned! Hopefully it won't cost me all my pictures to have learned that. This drive isn't very old. I bought it last year and it sat in a cupboard up until a week ago, when I pulled it out after my laptop started acting squirrely.
@looseimages Thanks, I hope so too!
@brumbe Thank you! That helped a lot!
For the computer savvy (which I am not) here is (hopefully) a shortened story of what happened and what I have tried thusfar.
I had a 750BG Western Digital External HDD thats about 3 years old. I have dropped it and beat on it relentlessly (not intentionally) and it is still going strong! It getting on the full side so a while back I decided to buy another drive. Since this one had been good to me, I went with another Western Digital. I kept this in a cupboard up until last week. My other drive is practically full now and my computer was acting up, so I backed everything to the new drive. Since then I have dropped it 2x. The second time the casing came apart. A half hour later I finally got it back together. (This one has pain-in-the-butt grip things on the side that make it a drag to get back in correctly.) I checked, everything worked fine and continued to use it. That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday I was using it, it worked fine, then suddenly it froze. I waited about 5 mins for it to respond. It didn't, so I forced it to close (Ctrl+Alt+Delete>Start Task Manager>End Task). I went back into Computer to open it back up again, it wasn't there. I unplugged it and tried again. Still nothing. Unplugged it, restarted the comp. Nothing. I unplugged everything and shut the comp down, let everything sit overnight. Restarted everything. Still nothing. Right-clicked Computer>Manage>Disk Management. The only information it gives for the drive is Disk 1 (Name), Unknown (drive letter), Unreadable (Contents). I was instructed to change the drive letter, but when you right-click the only options it gives is Properties and Help. So that lead was a bust. I also tried using different USB cables, ports, and computers. And taking it out of the enclosure incase something inside was blocking a connection somewhere. Still nothing. So that's where I'm at now. My friend will probably put the drive into a computer and use it as a slave. That's the only other thing I can think of. If I knew how, I would do it myself. If anyone has anything they think might help, I am all ears. I will try anything as long as it wont compromise any of the data. I am still slightly hopeful and wont give up until all of my sources say there is nothing left to do.
Thanks again to everyone for your support. It means a lot. I will let you know how things go.
Some data MAY have been lost if the disks were scratched..
If you can get a form of FLASH storage, which works different from an actual HD, i would recommend that instead. Flash storage is much more resilient to drops and falls as it doesnt have quite so many "working" parts to be broken.
Most Large size externals are not Flash storage. Camera memory cards or Pen drives are examples of flash storage.
And yes.... backups for your backups for your backups backups. Lol.
I didn’t see you mention online back-up tho? Most servers have redundant HDs in them (aka there are two drives that both hold the same data) making it difficult to ever lose the data. Also in the computer world… anything older then 2yrs is pretty old ;]
Best of luck!
And I know all too well about outdated computer stuff. I have a desktop, 2 laptops, a netbook, and a tablet (the things that look like mini iPads/Droids on Steroids). Each to replace the one before it. Haha.
Update: I tried using EASEUS Data Recovery. It found the HD, but couldn't find anything on it. Hoping that's not an omen for whats to come, but we'll see!
Either way, when I go to Start>computer, the HD doesn't show up anywhere anymore, except for under Disk Managment. And even then, it has no information on it whatsoever and doesn't have a drive letter, nor will it let me assign it one.
Guess I had better start saving up my pennies to take it to a pro to retrieve the data, if possible.