Author Topic: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)  (Read 5019 times)

TallDude

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The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« on: November 17, 2020, 03:01:16 PM »
Being a video and photo junkie, I amass Gigs of fun. I have an SSD in my workstation which is my CAD work lifeline. My external drives handle terabytes of family and fun. I had bought an external 4TB as a back-up, but ended up using for all my current videos and photos. Two weeks ago it crashed. There was no back-up, because it was my back-up ...... had become my current storage. Nooooooo! Sloppy me.
The local computer repair shop runs diagnostic's and Spinrite which I used to use, but that was a no go. They referred me to '$300 Data Recovery' in Studio City, Ca. Frik'n awesome people. They opened my HD and found the heads stuck on one side. Un-stuck them and BINGO! I got everything back today on a new back-up drive. These people have quite an operation.
Computer nerds only watch..

https://youtu.be/TIwbndHTp_8
It's not overhead to me!
8'8" L-41 ST and a whole pile of boards I rarely use.

burchas

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #1 on: November 17, 2020, 04:40:23 PM »
Phew! You got off easy. $300 is nothing. I know some horror stories ending up there in the thousands. Keep mine on the cloud. 2 Tera is fairly cheap these days.
in progress...

PonoBill

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #2 on: November 17, 2020, 09:18:19 PM »
Years ago I had some friends who ran a clean room data recovery operation. I was curious enough to want to play with the gear, so they let me--because they were nuts and irresponsible. It turns out that geeky motorcycle mechanics make good data recovery dudes. I actually managed to recover data from some drives they had pronounced unrecoverable. Kind of fun in the same way that putting a big puzzle together is fun (not really). It's been literally multiple decades, but I expect the tech is about the same. Most of the time the problem was fairly simple. the logic boards die (bypass with another), the heads get stuck somewhere, a piece of shmutz gets stuck somewhere. I was tempted to go into the biz but I discovered that bullshit is more precious, so I stuck with my advertising agency. Fun though.
Foote 10'4X34", SIC 17.5 V1 hollow and an EPS one in Hood River. Foote 9'0" x 31", L41 8'8", 18' Speedboard, etc. etc.

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #3 on: November 18, 2020, 02:28:53 AM »
Phew! You got off easy. $300 is nothing. I know some horror stories ending up there in the thousands. Keep mine on the cloud. 2 Tera is fairly cheap these days.

You know, when you realize what you have done, and it really sinks in that you have done it...they could really gouge.  Something very reassuring about that video.

PonoBill

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #4 on: November 18, 2020, 07:01:41 AM »
Cool video. That operation is far more sophisticated than my friend's outfit. 300 bucks is amazing considering the likely cost of their equipment and worker know-how.
Foote 10'4X34", SIC 17.5 V1 hollow and an EPS one in Hood River. Foote 9'0" x 31", L41 8'8", 18' Speedboard, etc. etc.

supthecreek

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #5 on: November 18, 2020, 11:09:20 AM »
Glad that worked out for you TD!
I paid pros to recover an early Mac that I used for business.... they got 2% of the info back.
It was pre back-ups and clouds.

Now I have so much raw SUP video that I have 5 externals storing it. When one gets close to full, I buy another.
6TB - 5TB - 4TB - 3TB and 2TB
No way I can afford that much cloud storage.
I keep the footage to use for many uses... and it's also a nice history of SUP evolution since I got into video.

TallDude

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #6 on: November 18, 2020, 11:27:55 AM »
Glad that worked out for you TD!
I paid pros to recover an early Mac that I used for business.... they got 2% of the info back.
It was pre back-ups and clouds.

Now I have so much raw SUP video that I have 5 externals storing it. When one gets close to full, I buy another.
6TB - 5TB - 4TB - 3TB and 2TB
No way I can afford that much cloud storage.
I keep the footage to use for many uses... and it's also a nice history of SUP evolution since I got into video.
Just keep them stored in a safe dry place. I would have thought our safe would be good, but it developed mold inside and just about ruined all our important documents. We don't know where the moisture came from? I don't trust it anymore. My file cabinets seem like a good spot.
It's not overhead to me!
8'8" L-41 ST and a whole pile of boards I rarely use.

supsean

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #7 on: November 18, 2020, 01:28:37 PM »
Great to have that kind of result!  I didn't even think about a physical fixable issue on a hard drive. I always figured a drive fails, it will destroy a bunch of files in the very least.

I keep all my files on a local RAID 5 and a backup that drive and my main drive every night to externals. Have had too many issues with HD in the past not to. Thinking about cloud storage, but it gets difficult with video.
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burchas

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #8 on: November 18, 2020, 01:39:23 PM »
Now I have so much raw SUP video that I have 5 externals storing it. When one gets close to full, I buy another.
6TB - 5TB - 4TB - 3TB and 2TB
No way I can afford that much cloud storage.

...Thinking about cloud storage, but it gets difficult with video.

Try Amazon AWS Glacier. $1 per Terabyte per month. Pretty flexible retrieval policy and I think you could still ship them all the drives so no lengthy upload periods.

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/?hp=tile&so-exp=below
« Last Edit: November 18, 2020, 01:41:12 PM by burchas »
in progress...

surfcowboy

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #9 on: November 18, 2020, 08:42:45 PM »
Burchas, thank you for beating me to that. A buck a TB per month compared to the hassles of on premise storage is a no brainer.

Keep your drives of course, for access. But safe from theft, fire, flood etc is nice for your backup. And remember, you aren’t accessing that stuff much anyway. In my biz it’s calculated that people restore less than 2% of what they archive anyway.

surfcowboy

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #10 on: November 18, 2020, 08:47:51 PM »
The $300 guys are great.

Pono, there’s a ton of media being messed up down here so the high volume works out. And you called it. I’d bet 90% of their jobs are just swapping a controller board out and bam, you’re done. You make your money that way and suffer through the hard ones.

A friend here worked on the bench at a Mac repair shop. He just collected one of every drive he saw when people upgraded. After a couple of years he had a spare part for almost any drive he saw. He made a mint based on his junk pile.

I’m glad to be out of hardware. Painful. And yeah, my top recovery quote I got when I installed  big drive arrays was $23,000 for a raid recovery. Ouch.

PonoBill

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #11 on: November 18, 2020, 09:15:25 PM »
Yeah, the funny thing is that Raid 5, which any serious server is using, is highly reliable and recoverable as long as you stay on top of it. when one drive pukes you can yank it out, replace it, and the system will redistribute over time--no sweat. but if you don't pay attention, and two drives fail, or at least develop too many bad sectors, you are totally fucked. recovering data that is distributed and sort of backed up over three separate drives is not simple. Especially if they are all huge drives.

At Babcock & Jenkins we had a big raid system puke, and the quote I got for rebuilding it was $20K. Fortunately, it turned out that we had this monster automated tape backup system that everyone had forgotten about--we never touched it once it was installed--and it had everything on it. We ripped all the drives out, put them in a box. Replaced them with newer, much bigger, much cheaper drives, and restored from backup. by Monday morning we were back in biz. Amazingly lucky. I actually had been resting my coffee cups on the tape backup system while we were figuring out what to do--I had no idea what it was--kind of a high-tech end table. I paid about 10K for it three years earlier and then forgot about it. Some days it better to be lucky than smart.

But yeah, I'm going to look at Amazon glacier storage--it's probably mostly in the new server farm in the Dalles.
Foote 10'4X34", SIC 17.5 V1 hollow and an EPS one in Hood River. Foote 9'0" x 31", L41 8'8", 18' Speedboard, etc. etc.

supthecreek

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #12 on: November 19, 2020, 04:37:39 AM »
Now I have so much raw SUP video that I have 5 externals storing it. When one gets close to full, I buy another.
6TB - 5TB - 4TB - 3TB and 2TB
No way I can afford that much cloud storage.

...Thinking about cloud storage, but it gets difficult with video.

Try Amazon AWS Glacier. $1 per Terabyte per month. Pretty flexible retrieval policy and I think you could still ship them all the drives so no lengthy upload periods.

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/?hp=tile&so-exp=below

Thanks burchas, seems like a great solution!
Questions for you techies....
So far, I have made al vids in Imovie.
I upload my video to current External MyBook for MAC

Problem:
I can only upload videos to YouTube IF all clips came from the same external hard drive.
I finally discovered out that I could copy clips from hard drive #3 to hard drive #6 (current) and make a successful video for YouTube.

So:
If raw video is uploaded to cloud storage:
1- will I be able to work directly from the cloud, or does it have to be recovered each time?
2- Can I view it in Icloud?
3- if I download clips from Icloud (that were all from different hard drives) will they play nice together in Imovie, so I can upload projects to YouTube?

It is a huge frustration to me, that I can't easily make videos sourced from different externals... which I do all the time.
I can't even have two externals open at the same time and make a usable video.
I have to copy from #3 to #6, then close #3 and physically unplug it.
THEN use the clips on #6 to make a project.
Otherwise it will absolutely NOT upload to YouTube.

Any guess if cloud storage will be a solution to that?
Thanks...I'm a hack with limited tech knowledge, but I work all day, everyday with these restrictions..

burchas

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #13 on: November 19, 2020, 06:27:53 AM »

Problem:
I can only upload videos to YouTube IF all clips came from the same external hard drive.
I finally discovered out that I could copy clips from hard drive #3 to hard drive #6 (current) and make a successful video for YouTube.

As far as iMovie goes, I never liked the upload direct to YouTube. Had many issues with that so in my workflow I always use export to file.
This lets me create the movie file independently on whichever drive I choose and then manually upload it to Youtube when I'm good and ready.

I have an external folder where I keep all my final edits so I don't have to go into iMovie for that. This also allows me to save the edit in the highest quality possible
and scale it down if needed without worrying about loosing quality. I usually delete ALL the raw footage after final edits (unless certain footage has some other value worth keeping for)

Maybe it's an easy fix to your problem without going to other solutions.


So:
If raw video is uploaded to cloud storage:
1- will I be able to work directly from the cloud, or does it have to be recovered each time?
2- Can I view it in Icloud?
3- if I download clips from Icloud (that were all from different hard drives) will they play nice together in Imovie, so I can upload projects to YouTube?

It is a huge frustration to me, that I can't easily make videos sourced from different externals... which I do all the time.
I can't even have two externals open at the same time and make a usable video.
I have to copy from #3 to #6, then close #3 and physically unplug it.
THEN use the clips on #6 to make a project.
Otherwise it will absolutely NOT upload to YouTube.

Any guess if cloud storage will be a solution to that?
Thanks...I'm a hack with limited tech knowledge, but I work all day, everyday with these restrictions..

The combinations of iMovie and iCloud is very restrictive. for $120 annually you could use Dropbox for your most used files (2 Tera worth of data)
and this will allow you immediate access assuming you have the space on the drive where Dropbox library is located.
Other rarely used files could be backed up in more cost effective solution (and less accessible) solution like Glacier.

There are other high-end solutions that will let you have media libraries in the cloud but it's usually geared towards pros and come with a hefty price tag.

As you you already know, iMovie has many restrictions due to its insistence on keeping everything in its own library for the sake of simplicity (and monetization).
So if you're looking for more flexibility you may have outgrown iMovie
« Last Edit: November 19, 2020, 06:29:40 AM by burchas »
in progress...

supthecreek

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Re: The super techies saved my crashed drive:)
« Reply #14 on: November 19, 2020, 04:25:24 PM »
Burchas thanks for the helpful information and thoughtful reply!
I'll start with your finish
"if you're looking for more flexibility you may have outgrown iMovie"
I totally agree with that.

I downloaded Davinci Resolve but will have to learn from the ground up.
Where's the "on" button?  ;D

On creating files:
I can't even create a file for the desktop, if the RAW footage resides on several different externals.... so I "copy to" my current creation external HD

I rarely delete RAW footage because I constantly search them for usable footage for many new projects that require footage of something specific.
Before I ran into this problem (which happened after some "Update"), I pulled clips into projects so I could locate them from my endless store of vids (sometimes 3 cameras filming a session)
What? You think this stuff just happens???  ;D ;D ;D

Since I hunt through archived stuff all the time, looking for a specific clip... all RAW footage has to be readily accessible.
The easiest way I have found to find a clip is to create a project which has all relevant footage and name it something useful like "paddling out"
Everytime I see a clip of someone paddling out that may be useful in a "how to" video, I paste it into that project.... so that one project may have clips from 4 different extenals.

Much as I need to, I hate the thought of leaving Imovie since, I have it semi wired and can do a lot of cool stuff.... and I never needed to "learn" it. It's nicely intuitive.

BUT.... I do need to backup ALL of my RAW footage to Amazon Glacier, to protect it from drive failure or other calamity


 

 


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