I've just lost all my pictures!!!

[chud67]

So you back up all your pictures onto an external hard drive as you're told to do over and over again. You then have about 6500 images in total going back years. Including your own wedding. The dog knocks the hard drive onto the floor. Your laptop will not now recognise the drive. Nor will the computer engineer's pc recognise the drive. I am calm at the moment. How would you feel?

[Nicole]

I was pretty gutted when it happened to me, gutted but calm. I'd been transferring photos from my laptop to a portable HD, then it basically just got corrupted. No computer would recognise it. So I started downloading demos of file recovery software, and now I really just need to go through the files it recovered. That's going to be a huge task.

Oh yeah, and new solution is going to be a better file backup system...

[TheDarkReaver]

There're ways to recover at least some of the data. Do not give up hope! (and get a sturdier drive)

You may even have just damaged the connectors.

So yeah, basically I'd just be a little bit pissed off, then set about fixing it. Happened with my X-Box recently. The video card failed, but I took it apart and had it up and going again in no time.

[Eastree]

I recently lost a laptop's drive to a fall. (I happened to have lost all my previous photography to a boot sector error and an erroneous format LAST fall! ... but they're not the same incident).

In almost all cases, what happens when a hard drive has an impace is that a certain little piece breaks free. It looks like a mirror and starts to bounce around inside the drive when it's shaken (it's not the first dropped drive I've experienced .... I've more often than not been asked bo coworkers, "I dropped my computer! Can you fix the hard drive?!!111")

DO NOT OPEN THE DRIVE! You can send the drive in to a recovery service, and since it's not data corruption, it will be easy for them to make a new image of the hard drive. The down side is that it's expensive. I last looked into it back around 2005. It started around $300 then.

But then ... it's your wedding photos! It's memories! I'd say consider the investment.

[RichardTaylor]

Posted in error

[TheDarkReaver]

Currys do it from £99. If they can't get it off using their software they'll send it off for more intensive recovery for extra (the sort of money Eastree is talking about I believe).

[Eastree]

Originally Posted by TheDarkReaver

Currys do it from £99. If they can't get it off using their software they'll send it off for more intensive recovery for extra (the sort of money Eastree is talking about I believe).

Yeah ... they can't use the software on the drive; it's not capable of being read in its current space. It will need to be opened up and the discs removed, unfortunately.

[gturner]

that is horrible news. I had a big panic when mine crashed.

I had a big recovery done on an external drive. the only problem is that it is not recovered in the same order you lost it - files and folders are all over the place, but they got them all.

oh, and the back up on the drive - it should be a back-up not a single location. At least 2 or 3 copies, 1 off site!

[sk66]

I lost all when everything was stolen.....it sucks! Sorry.

BUT fwiw, "backup" doesn't mean moving everything to a different drive.

[kirbinster]

I'm confused, you say you backed up all your photos to an external drive -- to me backup implies that the originals are still on your computer. So, what is the issue?

I keep all my photos on my 4 disk RAID10 array which is stiped plus redundant - so in theory if one drive dies I don't lose anything. All photos are also stored on an external drive, and once a month I copy any new files from the array to the external. In the interm anything that I care about gets a full size processed jpeg uploaded to Flickr as my "off-site" backup.