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Hard Drive Disaster

NickClapper

NickClapper

We are about to complete work on The Flight of the Flamingo (yay!). Well, that was the case.

Joseph (Cracker Funk) our wonderful editor sent me the hard drive with all the footage and project files in the mail a couple of weeks ago. It got help up in customs, for whatever reason, but eventually arrived with me. I then passed it on to Ollie (chilipie) our colour grader to start work there.

Unfortunately, the hard drive wouldn't load and just made a clicking noise. Ollie couldn't get the footage off and has tried different cables, tapping/angling it and freezing it overnight. Nothing has worked.

Joseph can send the footage again, but buying another hard drive plus the postage fee (which came to over $100 with customs charges) is a real financial blow, especially as I would like to keep any further expenses down. So I'm seeking your advice on two issues:

1) Has anyone had a similar problem? Does anyone know any neat tricks for extracting data from an unresponsive hard drive?

2) What are the options relating to large data transfers over the internet? I've Googled a bit but couldn't see anything obvious- are some services better value? Are there risks?

If anyone else has any comments (even just to commiserate) or suggestions then I'd appreciate them :)
 
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UGH !!! Awful! Joseph (aka Cracker Funk) edited the trailers for my feature (Surviving Family) so I've been watching your progress with interest.

I've used DropBox quite a bit; you get 2gb of storage free, which I'm sure wouldn't be enough for you.
But you can buy larger plans (starting at 100 gb) starting at $9.99 per month.

I prefer dropbox to USendIt because I don't need to send again when new people need to see the material - I only have to share the folder to them.

Good luck!!
 
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You might also want to take it to a local shop that does data recovery. Not sure what the prices are like in the UK, but I've heard tell of some pretty far gone hard drives that were recovered. Can't hurt to get a quote.
 
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JoshL said:
You might also want to take it to a local shop that does data recovery. Not sure what the prices are like in the UK, but I've heard tell of some pretty far gone hard drives that were recovered. Can't hurt to get a quote.
Click to expand...

it's expensive and only for data that isn't backed up somewhere else.
would be a waste of his time, it's definitely cheaper to buy a hard drive.

hard drives are cheap these days
 
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sfoster said:
it's expensive and only for data that isn't backed up somewhere else.
would be a waste of his time, it's definitely cheaper to buy a hard drive.

hard drives are cheap these days
Click to expand...

+1

And get into the habit of backing up all your data. Imagine if the master had been lost and there was no backup. So ideally get 2x HDs.

I had an HD go haywire on me recently. I had a backup so all was okay.
 
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Hard drives are cheap, yes, but given that we're talking shipping it across the ocean, the $100 postage/customs mentioned above and the risk of the new drive getting damaged in shipping as well. Around here I can get a drive recovered for around $100, so it would be a little cheaper and/or safer considering the price of the drive as well.

Obviously, online transfer would be safest for the data, and cheapest because even if you need to subscribe to a service (I like Google Drive better than Dropbox myself) it'll be way less than the cost of postage. I just mentioned he might want to ask around (most places will give you a quote for free)
 
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A crashed hard drive recovered for only $100?
I've never heard of such a thing, great deal. Where do you go?

I supposed it also depends on the type and extent of the damage.

One of my friends had a hard drive crash here in maryland a couple months ago and they were going to charge him an arm and a leg. They couldn't recover the data so he paid nothing.
 
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IndiePaul said:
+1

And get into the habit of backing up all your data. Imagine if the master had been lost and there was no backup. So ideally get 2x HDs.

I had an HD go haywire on me recently. I had a backup so all was okay.
Click to expand...

there are services you can pay a small monthly fee and they will back up your data on a daily basis to their servers.
 
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Yeah, last time I had to look into hard drive recovery the lowest prices I could find were around $300 - just to see if it was possible to recover anything, final price would be determined based on the initial exam. So if you haven't actually lost the data it's probably best to just go with a new drive.

How much data are we talking here?
 
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A hard drive that goes click click click means dead dead dead.

Just curious... could the data be sent on inexpensive BDRs and the master kept at the sending site? Having the data on just one hard drive is a horrible risk. Shipping it just makes things worse when the Big Three shippers all have their own version of the "kick the box" game (this comes from a person who has a cousin who works for one and tells me about it all the time).

Or... perhaps a backup on tape would be safer?
 
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That really sucks about the hard drive. I hope it wasn't too costly.

It's just over 100GB of data. I think I should yousendit. Would require only a $15 membership on my part. I'm not a huge fan of dropbox, I've had some wonky experiences with it (files disappearing and reappearing).
 
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I'm "possibly" planning some international travel soonish, probably not this month though.. I could route through Heathrow?

Which brings me to mind of courier. Know anybody flying to London? What I'm proposing is NOT illegal by the way! Just in case it seems fishy.. If I was doing it, Id boot the drive up and confirm its not child porn or some other nasty stuff, also that it wasnt encrypted. Those are about the only "restrictions" that would apply. No custom fees or anything as I'm not selling you a drive..
 
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CF - how fast is your upstream connection? At 10Mbit/second you could upload 100Gb in about a day - but typical upstream bandwidth is usually more like 1-2Mbit/s, so it could easily take a week. That also assumes you are uploading somewhere that will take the data as fast as you can send it, might want to do some tests with yousendit before paying for the service, you may find they're throttling their incoming bandwidth which could really slow things down.

And on the other side - Nick, what's your downstream connection like? If it's only a few Mbit/s you could be looking at days of downloading on your end as well.

If you guys have the appropriate connection speeds on either end I'm glad to set up however much space you need on one of my servers, which would give you plenty of bandwidth in the middle and cost nothing. PM me if it's something you're interested in.
 
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That's very kind of you IDOM, thank you! My connection speed seems to fluctuate quite a bit but I did do a test yesterday:

2874138924.png
 
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