I LOST 1 YEAR OF FREELANCE GRAPHIC DESIGN WORK ON SUNDAY!!! 1 YEAR PEOPLE!!!

Finally saved up a bit of money working freelance to put back into the business so I went out and bought a 500GB external hard drive to back up all my precious little files.

I installed some backup software that I downloaded from the Apple website (a staff pick none the less) and set it all up to copy my work across. After a test with some dummy files I started the sync and then stopped it after only a minute in because it was going to take 2 hours and I needed to finish some work…

… and then…. gone….

all the files… 40 freakin gig of files gone…

The directories are there but no files. None on the original drive. None on the external hard drive. I’ve tried using Techtool Pro, File salvage and Disc Warrior to recover them but I get nothing.

If anyone has any ideas PLEASE POST THEM HERE!

To make it all worse IT ALL HAPPENED 2 DAYS TOO LATE TO ENTER THE FREAKIN COMPETITION!

:(

I work as a software engineer developing embedded software and I have a very complex development environment setup on my PC at work and had to travel to the US (I’m based in Australia) for 3-4 weeks for customer witness testing (and fixing of bugs/issues before the customer notices them) so I needed a development environment on my laptop which took over 2 weeks to setup. Since I got given the laptop and it had all the software I needed I was very careful with it making sure it never left my sight in transit and made sure to be extra gentle with it. After around the 2th day of work in the US, the laptop suddenly froze when I was compiling something and wouldn’t reboot with the usual “cannot detect system disk” error. From there it was obviously quite quickly that the hard drive had died and over 2 weeks work lost.

After the hard drive died management agreed it was best to try recover the data and I ended up taking the hard drive to a drop off location (we were under the impression that the work was going to be done in the state we were in but ended up being done in California) but on the way as I was stressed, jet lagged in a rush, I walked (actually ran) across a main one way street and a police officer decided to book me for jay walking. My fine was around $50 USD which I went to the local court house and filled in an appeal form to appeal it on “extraordinary circumstances” and they said they’d send me more documentation in the mail (I put my Australian address) but they never sent anything and hence I never paid the fine. After a few days the data recovery company (it wasn’t CBL) told me that the hard drive couldnt be recovered so I had to work for 2 or so weeks using remote desktop from the US to Australia (hint – incredibly slow). To make things worse the laptop was basically unusable without a replacement hard drive which Dell wouldn’t supply initially without having the broken hard drive which I assume was in bits.

Now earlier this year I went to the US with my girlfriend for a holiday it seems now every time we go through security procedures at airports we get the major pad down and bag search. I don’t want to say it’s because of my jaywalking but you never know ;).

Regards
Mark Jaywalker

From that moment on, I kept a backup on the Uni server, the Uni desktop, my laptop, one floppy and my home desktop…
I existed to write, backup, and occasionally sleep for the remaining 6 weeks of the year…

I still have the floppy, it’s wonderfully corrupted!! There is an infinite loop of folders on it somehow… you open Folder A, inside is Folder B, inside that is Folder A, and inside that is Folder B etc etc etc…Folder B contains an uncorrupted copy of my final thesis..(when last I checked anyway, I don’t have a floppy drive anymore!!) So, I have infinite backup copies all on the one 1.44Mb…the ultimate backup device??

I have, or had a g4 laptop. 60gb. I have had it for a number of years and have been using it for business, building my website, answering client emails, ordering, pricing etc. I have an inventory of over 400 items with differing pricing structures and weights that I get shipped over from the States. My business took me about two years to build and all my data was stored on this laptop.
Adding to the above, I have recently been audited by the Australian Taxation Office, within the last couple of years and have been fighting them in court. Of course, all of my data that I need, including rulings, letters from companies asking for sales, emails from suppliers, orders and taxation information is stored on my computer. (not to mention all my pricing schedules etc) and contracts.
I also have a 4 and a half year old son, and due to my family being in the UK, I have religiously recorded every moment of his upbringing, videos, and photos..over 2 thousand photos. I send this to my mum as she doesn’t get to see him often as she has breast cancer and is recovering with chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
I was about to go overseas to find some information on my business for my courtcase, and was in Dubai going through the airport. You know how you have to take your laptop out of your bag now? Well, I did this, gave it to the guard and he then sent it through the conveyor, it went through the machine fine. Great I thought. He then proceeded to place my laptop into my bag and hand me the laptop bag………without doing the zip up and upside down. My laptop slipped out of my bag, crashed on the conveyor, and fell to the floor.

cracked screen. failed logic board. I tried booting it in the hotel a couple of times and it would fail, with a big crack down the screen.

I took it to a place in the uk who wanted to charge me 2000 pounds to recover data.

I have a court case to fight, and every single recorded memory of my son’s first 4 and a half years, not to mention my website and every email and piece of music I have, all gone!

I am desperately in need of this get out of jail free card as it might literally be just that! If I can’t defend myself and prove that I have been running a business legitimately, I will face fines of over $100k, and possibly bankruptcy! I pulled my website down a few weeks back to work on it, and don’t even have copies on the server, nor of my email.

Can it be much worse? (my insurance company has so far refused to cover the laptop, and definately won’t cover the data recovery).

The irony is, I was going to buy a hard drive in Dubai to back up all my data as I figured I could get better value for money in the duy free electronics there!!

I have, or had a g4 laptop. 60gb. I have had it for a number of years and have been using it for business, building my website, answering client emails, ordering, pricing etc. I have an inventory of over 400 items with differing pricing structures and weights that I get shipped over from the States. My business took me about two years to build and all my data was stored on this laptop.
Adding to the above, I have recently been audited by the Australian Taxation Office, within the last couple of years and have been fighting them in court. Of course, all of my data that I need, including rulings, letters from companies asking for sales, emails from suppliers, orders and taxation information is stored on my computer. (not to mention all my pricing schedules etc) and contracts.
I also have a 4 and a half year old son, and due to my family being in the UK, I have religiously recorded every moment of his upbringing, videos, and photos..over 2 thousand photos. I send this to my mum as she doesn’t get to see him often as she has breast cancer and is recovering with chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
I was about to go overseas to find some information on my business for my courtcase, and was in Dubai going through the airport. You know how you have to take your laptop out of your bag now? Well, I did this, gave it to the guard and he then sent it through the conveyor, it went through the machine fine. Great I thought. He then proceeded to place my laptop into my bag and hand me the laptop bag………without doing the zip up and upside down. My laptop slipped out of my bag, crashed on the conveyor, and fell to the floor.

cracked screen. failed logic board. I tried booting it in the hotel a couple of times and it would fail, with a big crack down the screen.

I took it to a place in the uk who wanted to charge me 2000 pounds to recover data.

I have a court case to fight, and every single recorded memory of my son’s first 4 and a half years, not to mention my website and every email and piece of music I have, all gone!

I am desperately in need of this get out of jail free card as it might literally be just that! If I can’t defend myself and prove that I have been running a business legitimately, I will face fines of over $100k, and possibly bankruptcy! I pulled my website down a few weeks back to work on it, and don’t even have copies on the server, nor of my email.

Can it be much worse? (my insurance company has so far refused to cover the laptop, and definately won’t cover the data recovery).

The irony is, I was going to buy a hard drive in Dubai to back up all my data as I figured I could get better value for money in the duy free electronics there!!

I work for a medium-sized training administration company. In 2005, our IT Officer left, and as people had been impressed by my desktop support skills, I was offered his position.

Six months later, though I didn’t recognise it at the time, I was struggling to keep my head above water, filling multiple roles and having no real prior experience in network and server management.

On Monday, December 19 (it’s not a date I will ever forget), I attempted to add an extra SCSI drive to the RAID array of our one and only fileserver. Wading my way through the process without any documentation or prior experience, I inadvertently hit the ‘Initialize’ button. At this stage I was oblivious to the significance of what had just happened, and I rebooted, thinking all was well.

Needless to say, the server didn’t come back up, and as I saw the boot error appear, I realised what I had done. Being the cool cookie that I am, I didn’t panic.

“It’s not so bad, I’ll have to rebuild the machine and restore from Friday’s backup. We’ll lose a few of today’s documents, but that’s it,” I thought. So I called in a friend, and together we rebuilt the server.

After a few hours of installing software and drivers, I called my boss.

“I have some bad news – I think we’ve lost today’s work. But don’t worry, we should be back up and running by the morning.”

We got the backup software installed. Friday’s backup tape went in, and whirred away.

:::: No data found on disk. Please insert next backup media. ::::

“Oh no.”

Thursday’s tape. No data. Wednesday’s. No data. Tuesday, Monday, the Monthly… nothing. By this time I was starting to get pretty worried. Finally, we had success when we loaded up the six-monthly backup tape, which, as Murphy’s law would dictate, had last been backed up almost six months ago. For whatever reason, the backups that the previous IT Officer had set up hadn’t been working. I had naively not been testing the backups.

I called my boss again and detailed to her the gravity of the situation (boy, that was fun).

Upon hearing the news of the huge loss of data, staff reactions were most commonly tearful and mistrusting. Over the course of the next five days, I worked almost 90 hours, scanning printed documents through an OCR scanner, re-creating shares, missing out on my family’s Christmas holiday, and generally totally busting my ass to the point of exhaustion. This was probably the worst week of my life (although I’m glad I can say that data loss is the worst thing I’ve suffered). The whole event cost my company about $10,000 up front, and lord knows how many dollars’ worth of work.

Amazingly, I retained my job, and still hold the same position. I now work with an IT consultancy firm on large jobs, and have recently completed a Microsoft course on server management. We have set up an offsite tape backup, the onsite tape backup, and three separate network backups, plus Volume Shadow Copy. And I would have more backups if the budget allowed.

Thankfully, I have passed my lesson-by-fire, and will never, ever neglect backups again!