recovery of childrens pictures //videos DEAD COMPUTER - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

EVERLAST · 12-17-2011, 12:38 PM

I have had yet another computer crash and need to at least try to recover the only pictures and videos of my 5 year olds entire life

I have pulled the hard drive and have 2 others I need to pull pictures and videos from to put on a new safe backup

any suggestions ???I also need to have a back up from now on because this can never ever happen again!!!

Help if possible

SUggestions???????

Leon · 12-17-2011, 12:50 PM

You need to elaborate on what happened. Is the computer not turning on now? It could be a plethora of other reasons and the hard drives may be just fine. If that were the case, you can plug them into another system and recover everything just fine.

zamler · 12-17-2011, 01:21 PM

So you have 3 hard drives with images you want from them? It should simply be a matter of connecting those drives to a working computer and copying them. You may have permissions problems depending on how Windows was configured and where the files were stored (what folders). If so, you will need to "take ownership" of the folder(s) you want to access.

I would suggest getting yourself a USB flash drive (maybe more than one) and put your precious images on that. You should also get an external hard drive and use that to backup your entire system. Remember, he who laughs last has a backup.

EVERLAST · 12-17-2011, 01:38 PM

thanks fellas ...i figured it was that easy .....it wasn't when I had the wife up in my grill telling me that unless I figured out a solution life was going to be very difficult for me for the unseen future.

I understand her rage in losing picutes and videos of our only son

so flash drives for pics and vids??? and any suggestions on type of specific backup system???

zamler · 12-17-2011, 01:47 PM

I use a flash drive as one of my backup methods. I also archive important stuff to DVD's, and external hard drives. Another option is online backups. I have my own web host so I put stuff up there as well. An online backup is attractive because even if your house burns down, your files will still be there.

I use Acronis TrueImage home 11.0 for system backups (I dislike their later versions) but maybe someone else can chime in on good backup software, I'm kinda out of the loop on this stuff lately (same about good online backup solutions).

Russic · 12-17-2011, 02:02 PM

I've heard good things about Carbonite: http://www.carbonite.ca/

For me I just pay $10/month and get 50 gigs of space with Dropbox. Yes I need to manually backup important photos, but I just do that every few weeks anyway.

Anybody with an iPhone has 5 gigs of cloud space as well, so if you're concerned about losing the photos or videos you've taken with that, just turn on iCloud backup and it'll update all the photos and videos each night you plug it in.

Rathji · 12-17-2011, 03:42 PM

Get an external drive and install crashplan to back up to it. It will also support remote backups, if you put a hard drive at a friends house, or find a friend who wants to set up an offsite backup as well. You can seed the initial backup as well, so it doesn't take forever.

All of that is free, plus there is a small monthly fee if you just want to backup to their servers instead.

Currently, all 3 of my computers back up to my external drive and everything is backed up to both my moms and grandparents houses, and both of their stuff is backed up to mine.

WilsonFourTwo · 12-18-2011, 07:53 AM

If I had a nickel for every story I've heard about a raging wife/girlfriend that lost their "precious, uber-important, life defining" photos that they couldn't bother to backup or print copies of.....

Seriously - a couple USB sticks and 15 minutes of your time every few months. Life really has become that simple.

Hack&Lube · 12-18-2011, 10:05 AM

$5 a year gets you 20GB with Google's Picassa.

sclitheroe · 12-18-2011, 01:01 PM

USB flash drives are a poor form of long term backup storage - obviously anything is better than nothing, but flash, in commercially available drives, is right up there with floppies for reliability. Think about it, you're getting a 4GB flash drive for like $20.

I'd way rather see someone use a hard drive for backups than flash any day of the week.

zamler · 12-18-2011, 04:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

USB flash drives are a poor form of long term backup storage - obviously anything is better than nothing, but flash, in commercially available drives, is right up there with floppies for reliability.

lol, they are no where near that bad.

Flash drives have a data retention rate of about 10 years, or less depending on how much the device is used. If you put data on it, and then just store it, there is a high likelihood of safe data retention. If you use a flash drive frequently, the greater the likelihood of failure. Flash memory has a limited write cycle. Of course the quality of the product is important, the market is being flooded with cheap flash drives.

The point is not to rely on one single backup device/solution. BTW, the failure rates of mechanical hard drives is actually quite high. The difference is, when a mechanical HD fails, it often give you warnings. Flash memory, it just fails. My personal experience is I've never had a flash drive fail, hard drives, many. But I don't use a flash drive frequently, I dump stuff on it and put it on the shelf.

There is no permanent method of data storage, the closest we have come so far is print, and possibly media minted in gold.

sclitheroe · 12-18-2011, 06:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zamler

lol, they are no where near that bad.

Your mileage may vary, but I deal with dead and silently corrupted data on flash drives every single month, and every time, its a heartbreak or its a financial hit to people that should have known better, or should have been educated better by someone else. I've seen everything from wedding photos, to financial data, to engineering drawings all irretrievably lost on flash media.

Hack&Lube · 12-18-2011, 07:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Your mileage may vary, but I deal with dead and silently corrupted data on flash drives every single month, and every time, its a heartbreak or its a financial hit to people that should have known better, or should have been educated better by someone else. I've seen everything from wedding photos, to financial data, to engineering drawings all irretrievably lost on flash media.

I wonder how many of these cases are caused by failure to properly eject the drive before people rip them out? I killed one like that last week when I was in a hurry and ignored my usual routine telling myself it had always been fine before.

sclitheroe · 12-18-2011, 07:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

I wonder how many of these cases are caused by failure to properly eject the drive before people rip them out? I killed one like that last week when I was in a hurry and ignored my usual routine telling myself it had always been fine before.

Good question - my understanding was write caching on removable media should be disabled by default in XP and higher, but it definitely seems like its still an issue with many USB flash drives.

QuadCityImages · 12-18-2011, 07:47 PM

I use Carbonite too, if you pick one computer in your house to be the shared "storage computer" for your home network, and toss in a 2TB hard drive, you can back up everything in the house for $60 a year.

I told a coworker I signed up for it after hearing about it repeatedly on the Twit network, and he was like "oh yeah, I know about that, Rush does ads for it." Doh! Even so, its automatic, and you can access all your files whenever, from practically any device. Apparently the one thing Rush and I agree on.

J Diddy · 12-19-2011, 08:09 AM

I need to start backing up online....Carbonite here I come. I have a mirrored raid which is great for backups...but it isn't fire proof.

Rathji · 12-19-2011, 09:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by J Diddy

I need to start backing up online....Carbonite here I come. I have a mirrored raid which is great for backups...but it isn't fire proof.

A mirrored raid should not be considered a backup. If you have file corruption, or delete a file accidentally the change just mirrors over.

It isn't a bad thing, but I wouldn't bet on it.

sclitheroe · 12-19-2011, 09:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by QuadCityImages

I use Carbonite too, if you pick one computer in your house to be the shared "storage computer" for your home network, and toss in a 2TB hard drive, you can back up everything in the house for $60 a year.

I told a coworker I signed up for it after hearing about it repeatedly on the Twit network, and he was like "oh yeah, I know about that, Rush does ads for it." Doh! Even so, its automatic, and you can access all your files whenever, from practically any device. Apparently the one thing Rush and I agree on.

Geddy Lee is a Carbonite user?

GoinAllTheWay · 12-21-2011, 12:50 PM

Some may consider this overkill but if you have multiple computers in your home, the Windows Home Server really is your best bet. I've pimped this again and again but man, people who have lots of pictures of their children should REALLY get on board a proper backup.

WHS will back up each and every computer completley automatically every night without any imput from you. To be even safer, you can backup the server itself which is what I do. I back it up once or twice a month and take the b/u to work with me.

I agree, online backup is a very good choice, only problem being is the initial backup can take weeks if you have a large amount of data and a typical internet connection.

You can buy an off the shelf system at memory express for under $400 these days or if you have an old rig lying around, install the WHS O/S on it for around $100.

Cheap, very effective and very reliable.