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I just went to add some content to one of our external hard drives that we use as an archive and it doesnt seem to be reading anything on the drive at all.
Does anyone have any idea how i can get the existing data off this drive safely?
We have about 5 years worth of image content on this drive so its kind of important that we get the content off it.
Regards,
Lee
Do a Google search on Data Recovery companies. There are many of these companies all over the US. You ship your HD to them, they disassemble it, put the readable parts into enclosures, copy your data to a new drive, and send it back to you.
I also periodically archive my content to data DVDs. Other people use RAID systems where data is saved simultaneously on 2-3-or 4 drives, so if one drive fails, there's others.
I also save data to FTP space provided by my webhost, and on a GoDaddy account I have, that isn't otherwise public.
The problem is with those data recovery services, this is ADULT content that im wanting to have recovered and to be honest, im just not that comfortable sending adult orientated materials through the mail.
Regards,
Lee
Maybe the biggie adult webhosts - like CaveCreek - have referrals to data recovery people who are OK with adult.
http://www.gaydemon.biz/showthread.php?t=5461 you're not alone, perhaps the suggestions there will be a solution for you.
I had a drive that totally died on me...it had years of archives also. I found a company in California that had no problem with adult and they recovered the entire drive! They copied all of the data to a new hard drive.
They used Fed/Ex for shipping.
Let me see if I can locate that url for you.
Here is the company I used. Great service.
http://www.drivesavers.com/
Awesome thanks Lee :)
Regards,
Lee
Hey Lee
When we had a big Hard Drive crash in on of our servers we used a company called Drive Savers here in California. They do not care about the adult content. They are very professional, very fast. We gave them the drive that crashed and a replacement hard drive to transfer the data to.
Gave them the drive on Friday afternoon at 3pm and had a drive back that worked with all the data (but one file) 99.9% recovered on Monday about 1pm. I thought we were going to be fucked, but they really did a good one for us.
However they are very pricey, but well worth it. Check them out, if you choose to us them please let them know that Feisty Media reffed you.
http://www.drivesavers.com
Good Luck!
Chris
Thanks guys, any idea on costs?
Regards,
Lee
the cost is based on how quick and how much data they are recoverying. We had them recover 200 gigs and it was 3500 bucks. We would have gone under if i did not do it, since it was our accounting and payment server that went down.
if they can not help you there is a $200 fee to attempt the recovery. everything is done in a clean room and they give you updates as they recover the data.
if you tell them we referred you they will give you a 10% discount.
hope this helps. I know it is not cheap, but i have to say they were a great company, they actually set my mind at easy for that weekend that we were going through the crash.
Chris
also, sorry did you see their customer testimonials on their site? everything that is there is so true about them. I was just happy they also treated me like a real company even knowing it was adult content that was on the drive.
they also gave me back the old drive.
good luck lee.
I had a 100 gig drive and it was around 600.00Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
It had 1000's of dollars worth of content so I thought that was a bargain!
They even send you screen captures of the directories before they proceed so you know that that they actually CAN access the drive. Any way, they give you an estimate prior to committing to the work.
Remember of course, that you can deduct the cost as a business expense so that takes some of the "sting" out the price!
Lee,
If the drive powers up and spins up, and the computer acknowledges it's connected (you the sound that the computer makes when a USB device is connected) then download a free copy of getdataback from runtime.org. You'll need to know if your drive is formatted with FAT32 or NTFS; most likely it will be NTFS.
This is an absolutely amazing program that has saved our ass several times. It doesn't *ever* write anything to the drive being evaluated so even if it doesn't work, it won't screw up your chances of sending the drive for recovery. What it will do is go through and try to rebuild the structure of the drive and at the end it will list the files it's been able to find and recover, and you can check them out to see that they work.
If the recovery is successful, you buy the software, hook up a 2nd blank drive to your computer, and GetDataBack will copy all the files from the old drive to the new one.
I have used many data recovery tools, and this one is by far the best I've ever run into. It can basically restore almost anything (including drives that have been reformatted) except problems caused by hardware failures.
Chip,
Yeah the drive does power up, the lights even blink and i can hear the disk trying to work, it just doesnt seem to be recognized by any of our machines on Win 95, XP or Vista.
Ill give that program a try hopefully its something simple to fix :)
Regards,
Lee
That's a really good sign. As long as you don't hear the "click of death" which is a repeated clicking sound, you should have luck with getdataback.
If for some reason you don't, give them a call... they offer data recovery for non-hardware issues at a very reasonable price, I think it's like $300-500, and it's a tiny operation (I get the feeling it's 3 or 4 people max) so I'm sure if you ask them about adult content, they won't have an issue.