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Photography Question 

Evita Britton Stenqvist
 

A betterphoto.com question


hi! I've lost all my digital artwork on a hard drive that crashed.. but I have got one of my all time fav. picture here on betterphoto.com. How do I save that picture to my computer again? is it even possible?
Thanks!


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September 07, 2007

 

Alan N. Marcus
  Hi Evita,

It is likely that a high percentage of the data you have stored on your inoperative hard drive is recoverable. There are plenty of specialty service centers and computer repair shops that will do this for a fee. This can become a costly session and there is a chance the damage is too severe and thus the attempt will be futile. You need to establish a budget amount.

Now the possible good news, you might be able to do this yourself for a normal cost. I recently suffered a similar crisis. I was advised that likely the data on the damaged hard drive was retrievable. My problem was the computer would not start (boot). Probably only the boot sectors were corrupt, they advised. Luckily, I had retained all the CD’s that came with my computer when purchased. This included a set of restore CD’s that promised to restore to the as-purchased state.

I removed the inoperative hard drive and procured a replacement $70 and installed. I then used the restore CD’s and presto my computer was reborn (no owner stored data).

Next I procured an external hard drive enclosure (about $40). This is small box that accepts a hard drive. I mounted the old inoperative hard drive inside. The enclosure plugs into household electric power with one cord and into the computer’s USB socket with another cord. The computer recognized the external drive and using “My Computer” I was able to transfer about 90% of my files back into my now operative computer.

Never again:
Next I procured another $70 hard drive. I removed working new and operative drive and reinstalled the second new one. I restored the computer as before using the restore CD’s . Now I had two duplicate and operating hard drives. I installed one in the external enclosure. Now once each week I transfer data from the computer into the hard drive in the enclosure. My thinking is, should the hard drive in the computer fail, all I need do is swap out using the hard drive in the enclosure.

I know others will likely describe a simpler and easier and better plan.

Regards,

Alan Marcus


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September 07, 2007

 

Irene Troy
  I’m not sure about the “simpler, easier and better” part of Alan’s advice; however, recently I switched to a system that is allowing me to sleep better at night. I bought a 1TB Free Agent Drive made by Seagate. This is an external hard drive that includes a backup program that I setup to automatically backup the day’s work at various intervals. I started out having it do a backup every hour, but this got really crazy very quickly, so now I scheduled a backup for twice a day. Because this is automatic I cannot forget to do the backup. The drive has a failsafe mechanism that, (I really do not fully understand this part) supposedly doubles the backup and stores a record of everything in some other non-readable but restorable fashion. As I said, I really don’t understand that part. Anyway, after filling 2 external drives and doing redundant backups to DVDs, this system is easier and more efficient. I still backup important images to DVD’s, but work in progress is simply saved on the external.

All of this is of no help to your original question about restoring your lost images via your website. Unfortunately, as I understand it, your website images are not going to download in a useable fashion. The resolution of images on BP is low and usually the image, if even possible to download, is not of good quality. Hopefully, you will find some other way of recovering your images. I do feel for you - that is my worst nightmare!


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September 07, 2007

 

Evita Britton Stenqvist
  Thanks ever so much for the brilliant tips. But I should maybe explain what happened with my hard drive. First of all, it was an external one with all my school documents, presentations, music, family photos and the assignments I got in my photography class. So, I wanted to get everything onto my new macbook... that's when it went wrong. It didn't open. So I went back to my old computer and tried getting it everything up again. The computer didn't "find" the hard drive.
I took it down to a local computer shop, they had a fiddle with it but said that they just didn't know what was wrong. So they wanted me to ship it off to Madrid, costing about 700 euros. And that's basically my savings, that are supposed to go to a Canon 400d.. as my olympus got stolen and it's probably a good time to update to a digital slr.
Now... I haven't got a clue what to do about all of this, I'm wondering if I should put of the Canon for a good while and ship the hard drive to madrid so they can recover a bit of the info in there.
But as I said, I haven't got a clue.


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September 08, 2007

 
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