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My name is nathan, and I'm a computerholic.

  • Sep. 29th, 2005 at 11:49 PM

blaneyphoto
Yep. The past few days have been really hard. My new iMac G5 crashed, taking the HD and at least a years worth of stuff with it. Please don't tell me to back stuff up... I do, and now know I should do it more specifically, and frequently.
Luckily, I've got a bunch of older Macs. A few hundred dollars later, I've got 2 up and running - so at least I'm able to work... barely.
This has been a real nightmare overall, though. I lost half a photoshoot DURING the shoot - the computer just erased the CF card and its all gone. Reshooting on Sunday, but its totally annoying.

So... Apple will replace my HD. But its going to cost a fortune (thousands) to try to recover info from my HD. It might not be worth it. 1500 to recover the old, or 500 for half a terabyte of back up? I haven't decided.

Comments

( 10 comments — Leave a comment )
beforeigo
Sep. 30th, 2005 04:46 am (UTC)
If it's of any consolation, I WORK at the Apple Store and my computer just crashed. So, yeah.
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sbgrl
Sep. 30th, 2005 10:45 am (UTC)
Wow craziness! Mine has been a bit blah lately too, no crash thankfully. Photoshop though keeps getting buggier and buggier. I've crashed so many HD over the year and know a bunch of data. It really does suck.

Sorry
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blaneyphoto
Sep. 30th, 2005 11:18 am (UTC)
Thanks for the support!

Are you running PS in X or in classic? I was actually running PS6 in classic and it worked really well - I don't know if that would do the trick for you though.

The worst part about this crash (which was absolutely sudden - no weirdness, just instant failure) is the cost - we have NO money at the moment, and after buying a second camera, I thought I'd had all my big business expenses for the year... I can't win.
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sbgrl
Sep. 30th, 2005 11:28 am (UTC)
Do you upload all your original unedited images to Fotki to show clients? If so, although a pain at least you can retrieve a variation of them there.

Sorry once again, total bummer.
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blaneyphoto
Sep. 30th, 2005 11:39 am (UTC)
Funny you should mention that! That was probably the only thing that has kept me from completely losing my mind. I didn't always upload the full size files, but the past few months I've been doing that so that people could get prints. I guess I'll be doing that all the time now. Its one thing to lose the files from a studio shoot, but events like concerts and the 2 istock shoots are not re-shootable, so I'm VERY glad I uploaded those...

I've got a full weekend of shoots coming up, so I've set up a new workflow - As a result of all this mess, I got my laptop repaired (which I should have done a long time ago anyway) and its now set up in the studio. I've got the card reader, 80gig external HD and cd burner all set up, so that I can unload cards right away and back up immediately. Hopefully that will work!

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sbgrl
Sep. 30th, 2005 02:35 pm (UTC)
Yeah, that's more-or-less my workflow too. I download everything off my card. Once it's on my computer I transfer it to my external HD and burn a DVD/CD and upload all the unedited images to Fotki.

It's a pain, but with the amount of HDs I've lost over the years, I want to be prepared next time.
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greenpad
Sep. 30th, 2005 01:42 pm (UTC)
Have you tried doing the recovery yourself? I know nothing about Macs, but I've used recovery software in Windows on a HD that died, and got a LOT of stuff off of it. Basically just hook it up as a second drive on a working computer then run some software (I think I used something called EasyRecovery or something...it's been a while) and it will pull off every file or fragment of a file. I managed to get about 80% of my in-laws' pictures off unscathed.
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greenquotebook
Sep. 30th, 2005 02:52 pm (UTC)
Funny... our iMac G4 crashed just a few weeks ago. My hubby was able to retrieve everything from the hard drive by forcing it to boot up in the Classic environment. I'll send you the directions if you want.
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blaneyphoto
Sep. 30th, 2005 10:47 pm (UTC)
Thanks. I've tried all the usual things and used Norton and Diskwarrior. The drive is so damaged that it doesn't even show up when running these. There's just... nothing. I suppose this is why it will be so expensive to try to recover. I still haven't decided if its worth that much to MAYBE recover a little bit of data...
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greenquotebook
Sep. 30th, 2005 11:11 pm (UTC)
The problem we had was - I'm pretty sure - bad sectors in the area of the disk that OSX was running from. Norton and any other OSX based program we tried to run just... died. But when we booted to OS9, the bad sectors were somehow bypassed and we were able to access the hard drive and back up lots of important files. We had to reformat the drive when we were done, but at least we didn't lose everything. I'll email the directions to you privately. Use them if you'd like - or not - your choice. I'd hate to see you lose any of your hard work.
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( 10 comments — Leave a comment )