Back It Up - Send me your horror stories!
Quietrob
Posts: 361
I had a minor hard drive failure. An External Drive.
I lost only one file. One Folder really.
The folder name?
Poser/Runtime/Libraries
Yes. I lost the Runtime folder "Libraries". Geometries, Textures, Survived. My scene files? They were located in a runtime subfolder. Character, Props, Poses and Materials...GONE! I experienced that sick feeling as my recovery software said, "unrecoverable" again and again. Literally thousands of times.
I bought all of my content and A lot I had saved in various folders as well. So with the exception of what I got from Content Paradise, I can get it back.. They will restore some of what I lost but some items they no longer carry so unless I can track down the PA, and convince them to either give me or sell me back what I bought, I'm out of luck. If anyone knows where I can find Karanta, let me know. Freebies come and sometimes they go. I've had more than one author tell me, "sorry, I lost this or sorry I lost that" or they experienced a failure as well. So reloading freebies, finding them oh what a pain in the drain!! The worse is knowing you purchased something from another site and you find that site is either gone or has undergone rennovation. Suddenly they have no records of your purchase, so sorry, there's the door!
Thankfully DAZ is wonderful about keeping our content. Rendo is as well. But it's the customizations, the categorizing, that's what I lost and that was a lot of time spent spinning wheels and going, well look at that. I made a keeper! Or being able to find a certain outfit in seconds when scouring through a rather large runtime, that's what I lost as well.
Sigh...Let me know I'm not alone. Send me your horror stories about losing the precious.
So Sad...So very very Sad!
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I lost my hard drive when my rendering notebook slid off the notebook stand I used on my bedand onto the floor by accident., causing the internal damage to the hard drive as the contents of the drive spun and crashed against eachother rendering it unrecoverable. For some obscure reason, I did buy accident insurance, and keep my hard drive, from the notebook company, even though I rarely do that. so they replaced the drive, and I got to keep it, (had no time to get rid of personal data on my notebook's old one so I was pleased I didn't have to surrender it. but all my content is lost, including many scene files I would've liked to have.
I went into manage my hard drives once as they were playing up during boot up..
The setting for my third drive was different to the rest so I changed it in the options menu..
The settings changed ok but everything on the hard drive went poof!.. It was my main runtime drive lol
Oh wow! I can only imagine the moment when you saw the contents of your hard drive suddenly go POOF!!! It's like your eyes go wide and you think, It's not happening!!
I just want to know...when the drive slid off and was on the way to the floor, did it happen in slow motion?
At least you got a fresh drive out of it, maybe you can replace the content, but the scenes took a lot of time! The one thing we can't get back!
I'm doing once a week MANUAL backups now. The Auto backup did work...on my C: Drive, my external weren't!
I just let out a giggle and said to self.. I shouldn't of done that.. lol
Crashing during renders that I never saved the scene for. :shut:
This used to happen a lot as I was having an issue with my SSD constantly throwing my PC into a BSOD, which thankfully was taken care of with a firmware update, but it took me a few weeks to figure it out as I initially thought it was a conflict between having flash installed locally and Chrome's own version of flash.
This is indeed a horror thread!
I once lost my library because I was in my early DAZ stages and thought it was a good idea to toss everything in one folder. And I merged everything lol. My clever idea ended up in me having to reinstall everything as my library was a sad mess.
For the people who have hd's that are broken, there are ways to get your content back or part of it.
There are also companies who are specialized in this.
And there is a tricky way to get some lost downloads back as well.
You need to have set your browser history for remembering your history and not have deleted it of course.
If I am looking for a lost download, I do this:
Go to your browser history and there select "downloads". Then type in a search query if needed and the link to the download will show up.
Click it and your lost item's download will start.
I managed to track some lost items that way from RDNA :)
And then.....
.... they found out the E-mail was coming FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!
...had a hard drive go bad in the boot sector on me several years ago. Took about two and a half years of 3D work and a bunch of freebies, a number of which are no longer available, with it.
Still searching for pics I completed and posted so I can at recover them. Doesn't help that the forum archive search rarely works anymore and one has to manually slog through forum content listings and threads page by page.
If you happen to still have the drive laying around for whatever reason, hook it up and throw a Linux live cd in. Linux doesn't respect windows hierarchies and can get into places windows can't when hard drives crash. I've saved a lot of info this way on hard drives that've crashed in the past.
My hard disk in my 3D laptop died on me on Sunday, I spent half the day trying to recover it enough to get stuff off before I slapped in a (larger) hard disk from one of my external driver and started rebuilding. Luckily I had backed up my Content and Content Library db Friday evening so I only lost the stuff I had installed Saturday and which I hadn't backed up - which I do pretty religiously - and all the free content I had collected but not backed up to my install external drive, and my DIM zips I hadn't backed up to my DIM content backup drive. Some of the Free Content I will have on other computer I download them on, but some was only on that 3D laptop. Oh and all the tutorials and notes I had gathered together there. As you can see I am still thinking of things like Favourites and odd other non-3D stuff that was on there. But it could have been allot worse as this was a pretty dedicated laptop without much other than 3D stuff. :-)
So I am downloading programs to install again - Bryce and Hexigon, and the Reality and Garibaldi plug-ins next, lucky I have a backup of the Look at My Hair Beta on another external HDD. And of course this comes when it is pretty hectic at work and I don't want to 'work' at nights.
I'll try Vaskania's suggestion when I get a chance - but I am away this weekend or I could have got this laptop rebuilt and then imaged it to save this pain again.
Having always backed my purchases (and freebies) up to cds, I was persuaded that I should invest in an external hard drive and back stuff up onto that, which I duly did a few years ago.
This included all my purchases from 2 sites which have since disappeared.
Guess what. The external HD died, and so I have no back up, but do have this nice dead HD sitting there doing nothing.
Nowadays I have 2 back up external HDs, each one a copy of the other.
Same here, I lost my entire content library when my computer died last year - now I back everything up on two external hard drives. Luckily all my scenes were already saved on external devices but re-sorting all my runtimes out was a real pain in the behind
I have a Mac and I use Time Machine. Everything is backed up on the hour to a 4-drive 8TB FireWire 800 RAID. I then, every few months or so, burn everything to Blu Rays. In addition to the Time Machine backup, I also have some select valuable stuff (photos, etc) mirrored to yet another drive. When it comes to protecting my data, I don't mess around. My wife has threatened me with death if I ever lose the 60,000 photos of the kids that are in Aperture.
The hard drive in my PII system back in 1998 died after a year. I lost a ton of stuff. I swore from that point forward I'd never lose anything again, and I never have. I'm pretty strict with my backups.
I've had time machine fail on a number of systems I've supported over the years. If you're using it in conjunction with BluRay you should be fine but I don't recommend anyone putting their full faith in it, it's burned me bad more than once.
Open the bill after you are forced to send your HDD to a company that specializes in recovering HDD's. Granted, they were able to recovery 96 percent of data on the drive and there was not choice but to do it but the final cost still makes me shudder.
I feel your pain. I really do.
Thus far, I have been lucky (touch wood), and hardware failures have mostly cost me time - lots and lots of time - rather than irreplaceable data. Mostly.
It may be too late to do you much good, but let me say this to others (and to your future self): high-capacity hard-drives are ridiculously cheap, certainly when compared to the cost of your time. Buy one and back stuff up. In fact, buy two, back everything up, and keep one at a friend's house or your office.
I tend to buy 'bare' drives with good reliability ratings and then use a dock to connect them to my computer, but complete external drives are also cheap currently. You can check Dealnews or a similar site for bargains.
I had an external drive die on me. Lost quite a bit, glad I cant remember half of what was on it.
Since then I've stayed well clear of WD and used Seagate drives whenever possible.
Snap
thanks for sharing the stories.
update on my bad drive: it has at least 200 reallocated sectors. Chkdsk reports 65,700 KB in bad blocks. Some drive diagnostic tools hang when they are reading S.M.A.R.T. data. I lost the runtime files for Genesis and Poser 9. I need to reinstall Genesis and Poser 9. I think I need to reinstall part of Dream Home too.
Now I just need to create some recovery CDs. I know, I should've done it earlier. HP cd recovery creator needs 11 CD Rom discs. Oh yeah, the recovery partition doesn't work on my new drive. I need to use the bad drive to create the recovery CDs. Oh, the irony. lol Now if I can only boot from the new recovery partition by pressing F10 at startup. If I can't boot from the recovery Partition, then I can always boot from the recovery CDs. But CD rom discs are slow. It took me 5 minutes to load HP recovery menu.
Then I need to learn how to backup the folders windows, My Documents and Program Files using free software. Reinstalling windows is easy because I have the recovery CDs. But reinstalling programs like Poser 9 and Daz Studio can be a pain. Using backup software should make recovering program and data files easier.
so yeah, that is why you haven't seen me uploading new artwork/renders lately.
I think all drive manufacturers ship lemons from time to time. When I was searching recently, I read a lot of reviews from people complaining about a particular 3TB Seagate model.
'defense in depth' is your best strategy: get multiple drives and spread 'em around.
A lot of people swear by offline backups, such as Crashplan (that seems to be the one that gets the highest rating). Or you could roll your own system based on Amazon Glacier. The recently-Kickstarted Space Monkey also looks interesting.
..oooh they have a stinky pile of manure for free!
@angusm
Although it was back in the day when Seagate had a three year warranty. They've all dropped since then.
Bit like the car manufacturers who know of a defect and way up the legal costs versus the recall costs.
They've looked at the numbers, upped production and reduced quality. Things are just not made to last anymore.
Grummble, Grummble, Grummble.
I had a hard drive failure back in 08. I fixed the hard drive and resumed usage. I still have that hard drive today and it works fine. But had I lost the data then, I might've thought to do better backups now. I have one 2T drive now and I want another to do that backup thing so the most I ever lose is a days work. I'm making my own comic and there is nothing worst than trying to figure out who was cast in who whose part!
My agenda is to save up for reality paint and get another 2T drive. Yes I know there are larger capacity drives out there but I have a feeling the next generation of drives is just around the corner. At least I know I'm not alone. Why can drives become so flaky!
Also, I wish I had thought of that Linux idea. I used linux a couple of years ago to defeat a nasty virus and although it reminds me of 1985 in the GUI, it had no problems wiping out bad files and even giving me clues as to which files had been corrupted.
It was a few years back, at work, with an A- or B- class HP server that started showing the odd issue in the root volume group. After declining the services of the 3rd party service engineer the company that HP had sub-contracted some of their hardware support to and arranging for a 'proper' engineer things started to go a little strange!
The root volume group was mirrored (this being a live server and all), and the disk evidencing the issues (the boot mirror) was swapped out and ... the server failed to boot. Original disk replaced and the primary boot was swapped with the new disk. The server booted and ... crashed.
A little bit of head scratching and chatting with the (very good) HP engineer and we came to the conclusion we actually had two stuffed disks in the mirror pair. The primary boot was intact enough to run the OS once up, but not able to boot, the mirror boot was alright so long as all you wanted was to boot, it was stuffed enough not to be able to run the OS. They each (as good mirror software should!) filled in the blanks on the other.
After sorting that out it was simple - a little long-winded as things got juggled in and out and backups and restores were done and mirrors rebuilt :)
Luckily I haven't directly had that painful experience yet. However I'd like to share an informative example of somebody else's pain, and how habit can override even a backup. One customer I worked for always made backups. Every week for years a technician would pop in a tape and copy everything from the computer onto the tape, overwriting the older backups with the latest backup. One day something happened; I don't remember exactly what, that erased critical pieces of the system. Bad, especially on a system that affects hundreds of people and runs constantly, but luckily they still had the backup tape from the previous week.
So, the technician put the backup tape in the drive, and carefully copied everything from the computer onto the good backup tape.
OOPS.
After a very busy and productive month I lost everything created during that time to a hard drive failure. Started to rebuild on a new and freshly installed hard drive only to have the power supply put on a little light and smoke show before dying. Replaced the power supply and the medium high end graphics card died. Oh JOY!!! That workstation is now long gone.
I learned my lesson and regularly create duplicate backups to different media stored in different locations. Hard drive failure is not as rare an occurrence as I would like and has happened to me multiple times on different systems at different locations. If they happened anymore frequently I would almost feel like an exorcism or something was needed considering the fact that I know people who have never experienced a single hard drive failure and who have been using computers just as long as i have.
I may joke about it now, but that first time I was nearly reduced to tears considering how much work I lost and could not replace.
This may or may not help you, but I had a hard drive become corrupt a couple of months ago. I watched as one by one all my files became unreadable. I lost all my 3D stuff and reference material, nearly 160 GB. I didn’t think I would ever get even a faction of the files back. I was about to give up on it when my wife found something called Spinrite. It’s a program for checking and fixing lost and corrupt sectors. It is not for recovering lost data, but there were people on the website saying it did just that. I brought the program ($99) and ran it. The program ran 36 hours straight, and when it was done all my files were restored. Now don’t get me wrong, the hard drive is toast, but at least I could copy all files to CDs.
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
Every couple months I burn stuff ti disk. Originally I did this to save space on the computer, but later it because ritual since I was guaranteed to always have my files. Point in case, I have every freebie that was in the archive on the old forum. I also do this with the special events for halloween and christmas, since many places take those files down after a while or they only have them up for a day or week or whatever their particular case may be. I even back up my purchased products in case something goes wrong with a site.
I haven't experienced any catastrophic failures or losses -- the occasional corrupted file or stupidly-deleted directory is aggravating enough. I used to back-up everything to DVDs, but the time and expense really got out of hand, plus I got tired of replacing DVD drives every so often (I also learned the hard way that DVD back-ups are NOT forever). Now I just store everything on two 1 TB USB flash drives (one named MASTER and the other BACK-UP). MASTER sits on my desk for every day use and BACK-UP sits in a locked water-proof/fire-proof strongbox, and only comes out for updates, then back it goes. Been doing that for a few years now, and it's worked out pretty well.