In desperate need of a ressurection!

[Dave Johnson]

I haven’t used any of them personally so no first-hand recommendations, but I keep this list of data recovery services that were recommended by trusted sources just in case:

Data Recovery Labs
Drive Savers
ESS Data Recovery
Salvage Data

[Will Cavanagh]

No backup and you have autosave turned off?! It’s not like project files take up very much hard disk space…

getnmd.com
nationalboston.com

[Tim Boknecht]

I know, Will. I know. I didn’t personally turn off Auto-Save, it was just normaled to unchecked when the software loaded. Trust that it’s been turned ON. I have no budget for recovery service, so I will have to rebuild and learn.

Luckily, I did find a backup I did in July so I’ve only lost all the work I’ve done on the lastest spot in the campaign. I’ll take redoing days-worth of work over months.

*sigh*

Signed,
Dumbass

Tim Boknecht
Promo Writer/Producer
KAKE-TV

[David Johnson]

Indeed hard drives are so cheap these days, I have all my work and media on 3 different externals in addition to our RAID at all times … can you tell I’ve had experiences similar to what Dave L. described!?

Especially if you need to work on various machines in different locations, I highly recommend these quad-interface drives with FW400, FW800, eSATA & USB 2.0 available from Maxx Entertainment Digital:
https://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=133_62

Nothing in the world like the security you get knowing that you can plug into any machine at its fastest external speed and go to work!

By the way, I also highly recommend against trusting Lacie drives for media work … after having 2 fail on me within 3 years.

[Butch Golden]

You do have another option.

Here’s the senario. If you are running a PC and you know what drive has what on it, you can disconnect and take your lost files drive to a friend who knows how to do these things or your trusted computer shop guy who has file recovery software and have them hang it on their machine to run recovery against.

The recovered files will usually have some name that’s different than you would expect but the extensions will remain intact. Since these programs don’t usually give you an option of specific folders to target, you’ll more than likely end up with a lot more files than you’d think but they can be burned to a removable disc, (Cd-DvD) and taken back home to sort out.

Just don’t overwrite precious data by using that drive for any reason until you can retrieve your files.

2nd Senario
If your data-project files are on a different drive than your opsys, you can safely purchase and install a file recovry program and do this yourself. In no case can you install a program on the same drive as your files because of the risk of overwriting something that could otherwise be recovered.

[Joseph W. bourke]

There’s another possibility that you might try – I haven’t used it in a long time, but Norton/Symantec used to have a product that came with their utilities called Unerase. It seems that when you delete a file from your system, the data is not deleted until you overwrite it. The file system simply adds a “?” to the first character of the file. With Norton, I could do a search on the files I needed back and it would fix the file by simply replacing the first character with whatever you chose.

Here’s another possibility – it’s freeware:

https://www.geckoandfly.com/2007/11/27/how-to-recover-deleted-files-and-folder-in-windows/

This may be worth a try as well, before you go off on the data recovery (expensive) trail. I’d give Norton/Symantec a shot first – it saved my bacon in the past, and is at least worth a try – given that you haven’t overwritten anything. Good luck!

Joe Bourke
Creative Director / Multimedia Specialist
B&S Exhibits and Multimedia
bs-exhibits.com