Oh my God, lifes work was deleted!

[Member69643]

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<p>[[i just checked all of mine and they are still in my box marked 'negatives'!]]<br>

A lot of people in New Orleans had their negatives in boxes too.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Yeah and their computers didn't float worth a darn either.</p>

[garrison_k.]

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<p>Yeah and their computers didn't float worth a darn either.</p>

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<p>But their dvd's rinsed off just fine with a bit of warm water and dish soap.</p>

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<p>@Garrison... So the OP's choice of who did it the work and what software they used is irrellevant - they got his photos back and the cost was more than fair. Recovery can cost 10x that in some cases.Unless you know someone who has experience you can only hope the person you contract is good at what he does.</p>

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<p>Jay, exactly. But recall that the consensus was that Bob, the Op, shut down his computer and take his drive to an expert as apparently just spinning drives and using a mouse and keyboard writes over deleted files. And for the record, I am all for it and is sound advice. However, Bob did not follow the advice here and indeed use his computer, monitor and mouse in the recovery task.</p>

<p>Here's a question, lets pretend this expert that Bob hired and got him out of this jam, also first posted in the begining of this thread and proposed what procedure he would do to save Bob's data? The idea would have been shot down by Leigh et al.</p>

<p>Bob, please consider buying Norton Ghost. It clones your entire system. It can just back up certain drives or folders. It does incremental back ups so it only backs up that files that have been changed since the last back up. It's dead simple. You simply set schedules for say, Sunday at 3am when you are in bed and that's the extent of the effort it takes</p>

[roger_smith4]

<p>I'd recommend Acronis True Image over Norton Ghost. I've used this to clone my hard drive and swap out a bad one: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/index.html</p>

<p>I also recommend Syncback SE for backups (online via FTP and to an external drive.) I use this for work and home and like that it doesn't hide what it's doing from you (sync vs backup.)</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>I used to like Acronis, Roger, but gave up after several attempts of trying to restore a clone onto a raid set up. Ghost is still the only one that will load the raid drivers and restore a clone onto a raid 0 set up. At least in my experience.</p>

<p>"Redo" is a great one, too. Free, the open source community<br>

http://redobackup.org/</p>

[kyleweems]

<p>You can get Western Digital 2TB drives at best buy for about $100 or so each usually.. I'd buy two.</p>

<p>Get a cloning software (not sure what is best for PC, I use carbon copy cloner for mac) and mirror your entire drive w/ daily updates to both drives. Store one somewhere not in your home.. at your office, at a friend's house, etc. (some people suggest a safe deposit box, but that's a bit annoying to me).. anywhere that you go regularly so that you can just swap out the drives when you go to that place. This way if somebody robs you, building burns down, etc. you are safe.</p>

[bob_estremera]

<p>To Garrison' point, I stopped using the computer except for the technician that accessing my computer remotely after I opened the software file required to run the recovery software. I mean, if you need the software to scan your computer, you have to move a mouse and keypad enough to at least to get the process started. But luckily, it found the folders and files and all images intact.<br />It's taking 1.75 minutes to copy each .CR2 file! And I've got a few thousand!<br>

And I will look into Norton Ghost and Acronis too. Sounds pretty good and failsafe.<br>

Thanks again. Still can't breath easy until I can open the files. Won't know until probably Sunday. That's when I project this will be completed.<br>

Thanks again, Bob</p>

 

[manuel barrera houston,]

<p>If you know the name of any of the files, do a search, if it still exists the search will uncover it.</p>

[JDMvW]

<p>Anyway, I too am glad that it worked out and the price was very reasonable, IMO.</p>

<p>DVDs are great for short term backup. Do it. Long term survivability on them is more doubtful. Until enough time passes to know for sure, getting the now cheap Terabyte drives, even the USB2 ones, is possibly more likely to last than are the DVDs. Do both.</p>

<p>Back-up is like voting in Chicago in the words of Daley <em>pere</em>, do it "early and often". ;)</p>

[bob_estremera]

<p>Recovery completed. Most if not all files and folders retrieved.<br>

There are some errant issues though.<br>

some of my last .CR2 images taken appear with the proper extension but I get a 'Cannot open file becuase it is not the right kind of file" error message. When I click on the file it shows correctly at 14.2 MB but metadata is blank, except for the size.<br>

Any way somehow restore this or is it lost?<br>

Overall, a success but still lost a few things.<br>

Will follow up with another post about backups.<br>

Did some research on the subject so it might helpful to many.<br>

Thanks again everybody,<br>

Bob</p>