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Off topic-How likely am I to recover video
I shot a show about two weeks ago on three Canon Vixia HF S21s. At the 12 MB/s bitrate, they can store about 11 hours of footage on their hard drives.
It was a three hour show. Two days after that, I shot about six hours on each camera. I then deleted that footage, and have shot four or four and a half hours of footage after that, which is still on their hard drives.
With my hard drive crashing (…again, which will be about another $350 to recover), I want to try to recover video straight from my cameras to resume work on this video, because the data recovery place will take about a week to finish. Before I spent $80 on GetDataBack, or even $40 on a cheaper program, is it even likely that this show wasn’t over written by the 10 hours or so of footage I’ve since shot?
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6 Replies
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[Angelo Mike] “… is it even likely that this show wasn’t over written by the 10 hours or so of footage I’ve since shot?”
You’re not very likely to get anything back once you start writing over the drive. You really need to look into backing up your files in more than one place and/or get a RAID 1 setup, or go back to using tape!
(this is why I still shoot HDV on tape and why I say tapeless workflows are an accident waiting to happen… because nobody backs up!)
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Ugh, it’s been a (relatively minor) nightmare. Luckily-LUCKILY-I still had most of the footage that I lost either still on my cameras or backed up on another hard drive. Getting $150, 2 TB hard drives is pretty expensive for me, but I went ahead and got one today to use as a back up, along with the advice of the forum to get Cobian backup software, and an external enclosure so the hard drive can run via USB 3.0.
But I already spent $350 getting a previously crashed hard drive restored, only to not get back the two projects from there that I wanted. I’m going to get this one recovered for probably the same price. The extra time to back everything up, along with the price of new hard drives, isn’t going to be easy for me, since I’m still not making enough to pay for it all, but it’s worth it.
And I just realized that I should get the data recovery software anyways-I have another project that likely is recoverable, the last one that I shot, that I need to get.
I have another question about this whole issue since it’s happened twice now. Before both hard drives crashed, I think I must have removed them improperly-I started getting “Recycle bin is corrupted” errors, along with my computer seeing a different name for the hard drives. I have a few hard drives I use in this enclosure, and sometimes will switch them out to work on other projects. 99% of the time this hasn’t been a problem, but I noticed these crashes happen right after I could tell something was wrong after I switched out hard drives while my computer was running.
I turn the enclosure off first each time, take out the hard drive, put the new one in, turn it on, and enable it. But when I turned off the enclosure yesterday before turning my computer off, my computer took a long time to shut down, like a minute or so. I figured that turning off the hard drive must have caused some driver to be loaded that caused shutting down to take longer. And sure enough, next time I tried to use it, I couldn’t access anything, the recycle bin was corrupted and giving me prompts to delete it, I started my computer, and it deleted everything upon start up. I don’t know of an option like with my camera or a USB stick to safely remove the hard drive-I just turn it off and swap them out.
Should I just turn off my computer and then the enclosure each time I switch hard drives?
http://www.scenethroughglass.com
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[Angelo Mike] “Getting $150, 2 TB hard drives is pretty expensive for me… But I already spent $350 getting a previously crashed hard drive restored”
Do you hear what you’re saying? You’d rather spend $350 to restore a drive than $150 to back one up? That doesn’t make sense.
[Angelo Mike] “Should I just turn off my computer and then the enclosure each time I switch hard drives?”
What kind of connection? USB? Firewire, eSATA? it depends.
You absolutely have been causing this problem by turning the drives off while Windows was still using them. Never, ever, ever turn off a hard drive without ejecting it from Windows via software first. If it is seen by Windows as a removable drive (e.g., USB) then you should use the Windows utility that allows you to safely remove drives. If it’s an eSATA drive and not seen as removable, then you must shutdown your computer first, then shut down the drive and remove it.
Failure to follow these procedures will cause Windows to write data back to the second hard drive that it had waiting in it’s buffer for the first drive, thus corrupting both drives. This is what happened to you. Don’t change drives without ejecting them or shutting down first.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
If you ever get the “unable to disconnect …” some drive but you don’t know who’s holding on to a file on that drive, use the tool Unlocker. CNET review is here:
https://download.cnet.com/Unlocker/3000-2248_4-10493998.htmlUnlocker (say you pick drive H:) will show you all processes that have open handles to that drive. You can close the app(s) in question (eg, you forgot that you’ve got Excel open with an xls from that drive), or have Unlocker free the resource. I’ve seen Sony’s File I/O Surrogate hanging around (via Process Explorer) even though Vegas itself is not in memory. You can use Unlocker to unload and thus free the file handles that prevent Windows from allowing you to disconnect the drive.
As John said … NEVER EVER disconnect a drive that Windows thinks is “in use”. The only things that can happen are almost all BAD.
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Ugh, I see. Yes, it is an eSata drive. How regretful. I’ll just have to be mindful of that in the future. Thanks for all the information.
http://www.scenethroughglass.com
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Hi Mike,
Did you ever figure out hoe to retrieve deleted video? I thought I uploaded video off my vixia into my edit pgm, but when I opened it back up it asked for ‘offline’ files. I had already deleted off the camera’s hard drive.Hope you have an answer,
Mary Furlong
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