Well, guys, I'm sunk... :(

[Diamondback]

Somehow, something fried the hard drive that had all of my research and reference materials on it. Fine at oneshutdown, then 30 minutes later at next plugin, "you need to format this drive before you can use it." I've got several recovery utilities I'm going to give it a go with, but until I can either recover or rebuild I'm afraid I have little to no further data to contribute.

Unfortunately, this thing took out all my WoG checklists and notes too, along with my CAD files for other projects... so I'm basically Out Of Business for a while, limited to reading and chiming in with opinions but skosh on fact to back it up.

[David Manley]

!!! Oh no !!!

remind me, have you sent me any files? If so let me know and I can email them back to you

[Diamondback]

Don't recall, Dave, but they probably would've been Excel spreadsheets. I'll check my outbox, see if I sent you anything with attachments... Thanks. :)

[Berthier]

I have a link to a share file you sent me which is an excel spreadsheet of ship's specs and I checked that it still works. Is that one of the things you have lost?

[Nightmoss]

That's terrible. I don't think there's much I can do to help, but let us know if there is?

[Diamondback]

Thanks, guys--Daniel, the files I sent you are in my outbox in my email, so I just downloaded them back to local storage. Jim, if there is, I will--right now it's a matter of "hope Recuva or eSupport UnDelete can do the job, then if they don't make time to go into Geeks R Us and pray they can get something." (I know better than to call Geek Squad, their answer for EVERYTHING is 'your data is hosed, buy a new computer from us and start over,' as predictable as if they were reading from a script.)

[7eat51]

DB, I am very sorry. I had that happen to me once, and it is anything but fun.

Tonight, I will check what files you have shared with me, and will PM you accordingly.

I truly hope all works out well.

[csadn]

<- makes note to update his stuff, as he realizes how old the computer he's using to type this is

[Shoot@Me]

I hope something will come through for you to recover your stuff. :pray:

I'm with Chris, now... need to back up my computers as well.

[Diamondback]

Sadly, the drive that died is DESIGNED to be used as a backup drive... (WD Passport 2TB, now I'm thinking I may have to downgrade back to Seagate 1.5TB's.)

[The Royal Hajj]

This sucks man. Good luck getting everything back.

[DeRuyter]

Oh that sucks. Sorry to hear this especially with all your ship research. Didn't you send some of your spreadsheets to Ares? Hope you can recover the data. :pray:

I have had HD crashes in the past, but have been lucky with data (crossing fingers!). I have been putting everything on thumb drives and thinking about Dropbox/Cloud.

Eric

[Diamondback]

Thanks, guys. Eric, what I sent them I was able to download back from my email client.

UPDATE:

Good news - Piriform Recuva thinks it can recover virtually the entire drive.
Bad news 1 - unless I manually select the files I need, Recuva will try to recover everything, even the not-yet-deleted junk from the Recycle Bin and some crap from another computer that for some reason Windows won't let me delete. That's 38,000-odd files I need to go through on a list one-by-one... wish they'd let me select entire directories.
Bad news 2 - it WILL take a while, between the recovery process and even before that finding space to use as "lifeboats"--this is a 2TB drive, it was about half full, and on most of my array of external drives there's typically only about 250-500GB free on each. (And that's between two still-working drives identical to the one that got BBQ'ed, three 1.5TB Seagate GoFlex Portables I was working on cleaning one of to give to my mother as a backup drive, and two old 1TB WD Elements SE portables I'm working on decommissioning.)

But, at least it looks like I'll be able to get everything back... unless incremental recovery of higher-priority targets fracks over other stuff. Which is good, because there's also an architectural project I've been consulting on for a friend and a bunch of CAD files for custom parts and paint-masks for models I'm building, along with the backup instruction files for my LEGO collection, along with all my business and gaming materials...

[Nightmoss]

Good to hear that they've indicated an almost 100% recovery of the entire drive is possible. Sure, it will be a hassle going through all that date, but probably much less hassle than trying to recreate all that work? So, it sounds like the good news outweighs the bad.

[SeaRoyal20]

If you work somewhere with IT guys, one of them may be an expert at data recovery. Its worth poking around. He may do this as a side business. I used to.

[7eat51]

DB, I am glad it looks hopeful.

Wishing you the best - :beer:

[Coog]

If you work somewhere with IT guys, one of them may be an expert at data recovery. Its worth poking around. He may do this as a side business. I used to.

I had a hard drive crash once and was fortunate enough that at my workplace we had people and equipment capable of extracting data from hard drives. All it ended up costing me was a thumb drive to store the data. Since my computer was under warranty, the hard drive was replaced free of charge by the manufacturer and all I had to do was put my data on the new hard drive.

[Gunner]

Sorry to hear about your crash. 38,000+ files to go through? I don't know how long it would take me to even count that high.

[Diamondback]

Well, I misremembered... "ONLY" 35,606 O.O according to Recuva.

"Lifeboat" drive hooked up, starting by extracting my e-book library... if I can get those back, even if I lose the last few months of spreadsheet work I at least have raw data to rebuild from.

[Diamondback]

Update: looks like a full recovery. Files on lifeboat, reformatting drive, have an ISO direct from WD waiting to restore factory configuration...

[Nightmoss]

Update: looks like a full recovery. Files on lifeboat, reformatting drive, have an ISO direct from WD waiting to restore factory configuration...

Congrats. Good news for you and better news for us too.

[The Mad Hatter]

I learned my lesson! I have two large external drives, every six months I reformat one, copy all data to it. So at worst case, I'm maybe six months behind in all my e docs! Cross my fingers nothing ever happens though, but better safe than sorry.

[Diamondback]

If I weren't away from Home Office so much, I'd be considering building a new server with a dedicated backup drive for each drive on each of my laptops... total of four internal, (two systems, HDD's in two partitions on each) plus eight externals, and room required for four more once I finish mid-life rebuilds on this monster. (The new beast has a second hard drive bay, plus slots for two mSATA SSD's... right now the max I could upgrade it to is a total of 6TB internal storage if I can overcome my reservations about SSD's, two 2TB Seagate/Samsung Spinpoint M9T HDD's plus two 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD's. Only complaints: one, it's a challenge getting used to a new keyboard and touchpad layout, and two, formatting 2TB is S-freaking-L-freaking-O-freaking-W...)

[7eat51]

DB, excellent news. :clap:

I have grown to appreciate flash drives so much. Given the file sizes of my work, I can backup all of them on one flash quite easily. Carrying two flashes around for double backup is easy, as well as performing the actual backups. I wish these were around much earlier.

[Berthier]

Update: looks like a full recovery. Files on lifeboat, reformatting drive, have an ISO direct from WD waiting to restore factory configuration...

Very pleased to hear DB, all that work lost would have been a disaster for you and us:thumbsup: