OH NO!! Probably lost all my pictures!

Hello everybody,

I wandered if I am the only person so stupid not to make any backups of my pictures.

Since I bought my 7i somewhere in september I made many pictures. I had collected about 5 GB of jpeg pictures on the hard disk of my Laptop. For a while I had wandered myself if it would be wise to burn it on a CD. The awnser to that would be YES!! But I didn't own a CD writer, and I had asked some friends, but none had an external CD writer witch I could use.

Now my Laptop crashed. At least it looks like that. The message I get when I want to start up is: Error reading drive C:\ Abort, retry, fail, ignore? Or something similar. Then the computer just stops.. It looks really bad for my pictures. A friend of me is willing to take a look at it since he is more experienced with computers (professionally) so I hope he can recover them.

I hope that no one has to experience this because it is really awfull to lose the pics you've made. All the moments you can never get back anymore. Pictures of family that are no more..

Ok sorry to bother you guys with this story, but see it as a warning. Don't be as stupid as I have been, make backups!!

If all goes well I should know somewhere in the middle of next week if he can recover the pictures or not. I 'll let ya all know.

Greetings,
Roy

Roy Krabben said:

Hello everybody,
I wandered if I am the only person so stupid not to make any
backups of my pictures.
Since I bought my 7i somewhere in september I made many pictures. I
had collected about 5 GB of jpeg pictures on the hard disk of my
Laptop. For a while I had wandered myself if it would be wise to
burn it on a CD. The awnser to that would be YES!! But I didn't own
a CD writer, and I had asked some friends, but none had an external
CD writer witch I could use.

Now my Laptop crashed. At least it looks like that. The message I
get when I want to start up is: Error reading drive C:\ Abort,
retry, fail, ignore? Or something similar. Then the computer just
stops.. It looks really bad for my pictures. A friend of me is
willing to take a look at it since he is more experienced with
computers (professionally) so I hope he can recover them.

I hope that no one has to experience this because it is really
awfull to lose the pics you've made. All the moments you can never
get back anymore. Pictures of family that are no more..
Ok sorry to bother you guys with this story, but see it as a
warning. Don't be as stupid as I have been, make backups!!

If all goes well I should know somewhere in the middle of next week
if he can recover the pictures or not. I 'll let ya all know.

Greetings,
Roy

Click to expand...

If your friend can't recover the pics, don't give up. There are lots of places that recover hard drive data.

http://www.drivesavers.com/index3.html

http://www.datarecoverygroup.com/

http://www.data-master.com/svcsTop.htm

http://www.recallusa.com/

http://www.averdrivetronics.com/

Roy Krabben said:

Hello everybody,
I wandered if I am the only person so stupid not to make any
backups of my pictures.
Since I bought my 7i somewhere in september I made many pictures. I
had collected about 5 GB of jpeg pictures on the hard disk of my
Laptop. For a while I had wandered myself if it would be wise to
burn it on a CD. The awnser to that would be YES!! But I didn't own
a CD writer, and I had asked some friends, but none had an external
CD writer witch I could use.

Now my Laptop crashed. At least it looks like that. The message I
get when I want to start up is: Error reading drive C:\ Abort,
retry, fail, ignore? Or something similar. Then the computer just
stops.. It looks really bad for my pictures. A friend of me is
willing to take a look at it since he is more experienced with
computers (professionally) so I hope he can recover them.

I hope that no one has to experience this because it is really
awfull to lose the pics you've made. All the moments you can never
get back anymore. Pictures of family that are no more..
Ok sorry to bother you guys with this story, but see it as a
warning. Don't be as stupid as I have been, make backups!!

If all goes well I should know somewhere in the middle of next week
if he can recover the pictures or not. I 'll let ya all know.

Greetings,
Roy

Click to expand...

Is the drive spiining and not making any funny noises like broken glass, etc...? Chances are the drive is still functional and only the boot sector got corrupted. Try booting fropm a floppy (make a bootable disk from a working computer) and see if the drive is accessible.

Sorry to hear about your experience! A number of disk problems are recoverable (sometimes depending on how much you care to spend), so I hope you're able to recover your photos.

My solution is probably overkill, but it works for me. I store my images on a file server (actually a general purpose server) in my basement, which has two hard disks in a RAID1 configuration (meaning that the drives are mirror copies of each other). If any one drive fails, I still have all the data on the other. In addition to this, I also periodically create a tape backup of the entire thing. If I were super-paranoid, I would store the tape backup off-site.

Again, I hope your images are recoverable. I had a CF card go south on me a couple of years ago, after I had taken a bunch of photos at a friend's wedding, so I know what it's like to lose important images (though not 5GB worth). Good luck!

Cheers,
Jeremy

--
Jeremy L. Rosenberger
http://www.frii.com/~jeremy/

Dont't worry, the files are recoverable, I dont't think the entire HD is bad, perhaps only the boot record is bad. try the sites Mikebek said.

Roberto Ayala
http://www.digitalfx3d.com

Roy Krabben wrote:
[snip]

That hurts. I do hope you'll get your pics back; as others have mentioned, it's highly likely that the disk is recoverable.

As to backing up stuff: a laptop is just about the worst place to keep your pics. You can drop it, get it stolen, lose it, or otherwise abuse it. A desktop computer is much safer, and multiple duplicates on CD's are safest of all.

FWIW, here's what I do.

I store my originals in a folder structure arranged by date: year/month/day.

I have two physical hard drives on my computer. Every time I add pictures to my "neg archive," I copy them to my backup disk. In addition, I periodically copy my entire image library (including edited stuff, web stuff, and so on) from my main disk to my "backup" disk. This will protect the library from the most common cause of data loss -- drive failure.

Once I rack up another 650 MB of originals, I burn them onto CD's, which I keep at my place of work. (I just bought a 100-pack of Kodak CD-R Ultimas; they're archive-quality CD's, so I shouldn't run out any time soon.)

So, if my main hard drive fails, I lose my edited pictures. I still have the "indices" on my website -- those galleries serve as a portfolio of the stuff I actually think is worth something. So, if I need to print one, I will have to re-process it, which is a certain amount of work -- but still recoverable.

If my backup drive fails, I lose nothing.

And if something nasty happens to my entire computer (like a fire or burglary), I've still got most of my archive on CD's at the office.

I'm wondering a bit what happens five or ten years down the line: at some point, I'm going to have a fair bit of work transferring the archive to whatever storage medium is the thing to use at that time.

Petteri
--
http://www.seittipaja.fi/index/

Petteri,

It sounds like you're doing some things manually that RAID would do for you automatically. Have you given it any thought? Granted, it's not a lot of work, but I know that I would be constantly forgetting to back up the new images.

Cheers,
Jeremy

--
Jeremy L. Rosenberger
http://www.frii.com/~jeremy/

Jeremy Rosenberger said:

Petteri,

It sounds like you're doing some things manually that RAID would do
for you automatically. Have you given it any thought? Granted, it's
not a lot of work, but I know that I would be constantly
forgetting to back up the new images.

Click to expand...

I have, but decided against it. The thing is that I don't need to back up everything. In fact, measured in gigs, most of the stuff on my main disk is temporary: film scans, often several tries at a frame, that weigh in at up to 35 MB a pop. I don't archive my scans: instead, I archive the negs/slides. Also, I might want to dump a part of my archived originals that reside on my main disk after they've been burned to CD.

And it really isn't much trouble at all.

Petteri
--
http://www.seittipaja.fi/index/

Yes Yes Yes!!!

I am very happy)

The friend of mine was able to save all my pictures (and other data) from my hard disk. For that he just used an other computer (desktop) to approach the disk from there. I went relatively easy, in about 20 minutes he copied all data to another hard disk. Now I have my pictures on a CD.

I am sending my laptop in for repairs, and if I get it back I'll buy me a CD burner (or even a DVD burner)

Thank you for all your support! I was really afraid that the pics were lost for good.

G
Roy

Roy Krabben said:

Hello everybody,
I wandered if I am the only person so stupid not to make any
backups of my pictures.
Since I bought my 7i somewhere in september I made many pictures. I
had collected about 5 GB of jpeg pictures on the hard disk of my
Laptop. For a while I had wandered myself if it would be wise to
burn it on a CD. The awnser to that would be YES!! But I didn't own
a CD writer, and I had asked some friends, but none had an external
CD writer witch I could use.

Now my Laptop crashed. At least it looks like that. The message I
get when I want to start up is: Error reading drive C:\ Abort,
retry, fail, ignore? Or something similar. Then the computer just
stops.. It looks really bad for my pictures. A friend of me is
willing to take a look at it since he is more experienced with
computers (professionally) so I hope he can recover them.

I hope that no one has to experience this because it is really
awfull to lose the pics you've made. All the moments you can never
get back anymore. Pictures of family that are no more..
Ok sorry to bother you guys with this story, but see it as a
warning. Don't be as stupid as I have been, make backups!!

If all goes well I should know somewhere in the middle of next week
if he can recover the pictures or not. I 'll let ya all know.

Greetings,
Roy

Click to expand...

Roy Krabben said:

I am very happy)

The friend of mine was able to save all my pictures (and other
data) from my hard disk. For that he just used an other computer
(desktop) to approach the disk from there. I went relatively easy,
in about 20 minutes he copied all data to another hard disk. Now I
have my pictures on a CD.

I am sending my laptop in for repairs, and if I get it back I'll
buy me a CD burner (or even a DVD burner)

Thank you for all your support! I was really afraid that the pics
were lost for good.

G
Roy

Roy Krabben said:

Hello everybody,
I wandered if I am the only person so stupid not to make any
backups of my pictures.
Since I bought my 7i somewhere in september I made many pictures. I
had collected about 5 GB of jpeg pictures on the hard disk of my
Laptop. For a while I had wandered myself if it would be wise to
burn it on a CD. The awnser to that would be YES!! But I didn't own
a CD writer, and I had asked some friends, but none had an external
CD writer witch I could use.

Now my Laptop crashed. At least it looks like that. The message I
get when I want to start up is: Error reading drive C:\ Abort,
retry, fail, ignore? Or something similar. Then the computer just
stops.. It looks really bad for my pictures. A friend of me is
willing to take a look at it since he is more experienced with
computers (professionally) so I hope he can recover them.

I hope that no one has to experience this because it is really
awfull to lose the pics you've made. All the moments you can never
get back anymore. Pictures of family that are no more..
Ok sorry to bother you guys with this story, but see it as a
warning. Don't be as stupid as I have been, make backups!!

If all goes well I should know somewhere in the middle of next week
if he can recover the pictures or not. I 'll let ya all know.

Greetings,
Roy

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Buy your friend a bi-i-ig drink )))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
Regrds
--
Plamen
http://www.pantonov.com