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Have you had a Hard Drive fail….You may be able to recover!
This is probably an old trick for many of you out there, but sometimes you forget, and it’s good to be reminded.
We had one of our main media drives fail about a week ago on our syndication computer. This was very very bad, since we were about to send out the show for the week (we syndicate the same show with a different commercial package to about 26 markets weekly). The drive had hundreds of commercials on it, and all the close captioned segments that we have ingested over the last few months. No viable backup in place. Very very bad, since recapturing the commercials alone would take upwards of a week.
Well, I picked up a 1TB Maxtor one-touch on sale from Tiger Direct (budget is always tight grrr…), and put the 500 GB Lacie that had died in the DEEP FREEZER. After a few hours in there, I ran the power and firewire cable to the Lacie while still in the freezer, hooked up the Maxtor, and proceeded to recover the 400 GB of footage that was on the drive. One caveat, I used a laptop with Vista and MacDrive…it gave me a hiccup mounting the disk, but Vista let me “mount it anyways”.
System saved, back to work, and the show went out as normal (we haven’t missed an episode….new show every week for 23 yrs!).
The idea is that many failing HD is caused because of a broken piece of hardware. the freezer causes the metal parts to contract, allowing the drive to operate normally. Removing the HD from the freezer allows about 15-20mins of operation. I left it in with the idea that I would need it to run a lot longer.
So next time you’re in a crunch, and your HD fails, you just may be able to still make the deadline! Worth a shot, at least!
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7 Replies
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Hi Dennis,
That is pretty cool, no pun intended.
Seriously any information that will help recover
material from a failed drive is valuable.Watch now; there will be a big discussion about
which are the best freezers to buy.
(I’ve been up too long editing, sorry, bad joke).All the best
David
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We had a drive fail that had our honeymoon iPhoto book on it. We hadn’t printed it yet and it had descriptions of all the events that we had written while fresh in our mind. We still have the pics, but redoing the book way after the fact just didn’t seem possible. We took it to a recovery center and they had no luck. I think I’ll give this a try if I still have the drive. Probably don’t need more than a few minutes. So I’ll just throw it in the freezer and then hook it up.
I’d love to hear any other stories or tips.
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One item to note. If you are going to put a drive in the freezer, then remove it to hook it up, place it inside a plastic bag to prevent condensation, and then allow a couple minutes of re-acclimation before power it back up once removed from the freezer. This especially applies for internal drives. Since mine was an external, I ran the power and firewire cables inside the freezer.
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[Dennis Leppell] “No viable backup in place.”
Back up early, back up often. Not having a regular backup policy is like playing Russian roulette with your business.
[Dennis Leppell] “Very very bad, since recapturing the commercials alone would take upwards of a week.”
Weigh that cost against the cost of a few extra drives for backup. Keep an eye on sales through dealmac.com.
Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/ -
I have to agree. Better to spend a hundred bucks on a backup than a thousand on recovery services.
It’s the same when I’m out shooting on a boat. I wear a “PLB” or personal locator beacon, and that’s part of my compact lifevest. My brother gave it to me. It’s $550. I’ll probably never have to activate it. But I know of at least one rescue where having it meant getting the Coast Guard to the scene within 90 minutes, instead of searching miles of ocean for days (and maybe never being found).
It pays to be prepared. I always make backups of the projects. And I always have backups of the media.
But I do have a chest-style deep freezer just in case…. 🙂
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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These are things that I already know….But since I don’t control the boss’s checkbook, and HE learned his business practices in the 50’s, where everything can be done with as few ppl as possible, a lot of elbow grease, and the tv show is made from fairy dust and wishes, all I can do is clean up the mess that I walked into when I took this job. We’d all love to have a RAID array that mirrors your files across multiple drives….I’m still trying to convince them I need to upgrade from CS1. Heck, I’m still trying to convince them that we need to start filming/airing in widescreen.
So I guess this tip is for ppl like me that can’t move through the evolution of technology as quickly as most.
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Slightly off topic, but I thought I’d throw this in. I’ve had several external drives go bad. But, If I used a different interface connection (USB vs SATA vs Firewire) sometimes it would work. Other times, I removed the drive from the enclosure and pop it in a new enclosure and it works. So I’ve learned not to panic too quickly, but a little scare every now and then sure makes the backups more frequent.
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