Hunting the Elusive

The joy of the chase

This Just In

If some of you have been following my Twitter on the side bar, you might know that my primary storage hard drive died prior to the weekend, prompting the catastrophic loss of around 700GB of data, including all archived releases (my archive 1.5TB RAID1 array survived, along with all my photos and anime archives). A day or two afterwards, the entire system crashed in circumstances yet unclear. The lost data is lost, and I’m not paying anyone to recover it for me, but the upshot of all this is, because the dead drive contained one scan release I had just gotten ready, you will need to give me some time to restore my system to its proper configuration, reinstall stuff I need, and redo the scan (ah, the pain).

Additionally, my life is currently quite busy (in a good, annual vacation and taking photos kinda way), so that’s also gonna impact on this blog.

SONY DSC

I’m not sure if you have ever gone through times of your life when stuff starts failing a whole bunch. I had to send my main Sigma lens to servicing a week or two ago due to a problem with backfocusing, and now all this mess.

That said, I have learnt some valuable lessons. I’m trying not to think about the data I lost, but I rationalise it in that I wasn’t going to use most of it anyway. The dead hard drive was originally part of another RAID 1 array, but its partner drive died some time ago and I didn’t bother rebuilding the RAID. Now, I am going to look for a RAID 1 capable enclosure and set up proper backups of critical data to prevent such problems again.

In regards to the photo above, the Ranka book isn’t as good as the Sheryl one in terms of pure visual goodness. The stuff on the right hand side, well, I’ll leave it up to you guys to comment on that.

19 comments

19 Comments so far

  1. Felana November 24th, 2009 11:31 pm

    Hang in there icie, I know you can do it. And for the stuff in the lower right of the photo, I’m waiting for your scan as usual..XD

  2. Zeroblade November 24th, 2009 11:36 pm

    Ouch, HD failure really sucks hard :(
    As for the lost releases archives, I do believe there’s a torrent or two that had most of your older stuff, so I suppose it’s one way to get back some of your releases (though it must feel weird to be torrenting stuff that you yourself released).
    The book on the right looks to be Tiv’s work, which can only be a good thing! Not too much to say on what’s on the left of it though.

  3. icie November 24th, 2009 11:41 pm

    Well, with my releases archive, I can easily redownload everything from the host’s FTP. It’s the bandwidth which is the problem, really. Also, the Moko-chan is for a project I am currently considering.

  4. natalie November 25th, 2009 12:34 am

    Ranka book sucks tremendously. So does losing your archive :/ But it’s kinda good that it’s all still out there to download. And you still have the real things, so that’s even better :3

  5. TSPhoenix November 25th, 2009 1:17 am

    Yeah I learn this the hard way when my 300GB drive failed a few years ago. Its worth investing in decent backup (I still haven’t really).

  6. Jose November 25th, 2009 6:35 am

    Wow, I love this website, always uploading this neat stuff… Please Icie, get back on your feet, were counting on youuuuuuuuu!

  7. Merun November 25th, 2009 6:52 am

    HDD failure sucks terribly. I once lost data, not because of hardware, but a problem with the filesystem and no recovery software could recover the files because they were too fragmented and Windows already used a scandisk on it. Sadly, this is an error which even RAID 1 can’t prevent.

  8. PhuzyBuny November 25th, 2009 7:13 am

    I would hate it if any of my HD died on me T_T. My condolences icie.

  9. Madara November 25th, 2009 8:40 am

    AGKUFSGOLSIRHBSART YOU GOT RANKA’S BOOK ALREADY?!!!
    *AAAAAAAAAAAA* *so envious*
    Good luck with your HD troubles man >: <3

  10. soloista November 25th, 2009 10:27 am

    Oh man. That’s a lot of hard work gone. I hope you can somehow recover, and I hope you don’t have to do any further re-scans.

  11. Xcomp November 25th, 2009 11:38 am

    Guess what… My 500GB HDD just died yesterday too and I fairly much lost what you did so I know the feeling. Losing Anime archives aren’t too worrying because they can be re-downloaded if you ever wanted to watch them again (or buy them even) but, some photos are just irreplaceable.

    Can’t use any file recovery software on my drive because the BIOS and HDD enclosures won’t detect it but, it’s still within its warranty period so I’ll probably just send it back to get it replaced.

  12. {BC}Helix November 25th, 2009 12:25 pm

    I don’t mean to sound like that ass who suggests something really obvious and treats people like they’re tech noobs but have you just tried recovery software? What exactly went wrong with the drives? If you don’t know what exactly is wrong with the drives. Testdisk –> http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk is a good diag program. Programs that will rebuild the MFT and others can simply recover the data strait up. All the data that I’ve lost so far in the two crashes I had I’ve been able to recover. Most data can be gotten back from anything other than a complete, deep format.

  13. icie November 25th, 2009 5:43 pm

    {BC}Helix: I know what you mean, in that sometimes hard drive problems are just a matter of corrupted partitions or stuff like that, which can be recovered with software. It’s partly my fault for not specifying the problem, but this hard drive is conked in the internal hardware, possibly the spindle motor or the drive head. I think the data structure is still intact on the disks, but inaccessible without opening up the thing — something which could cost around $2000 over here.

  14. Chrissy November 25th, 2009 9:49 pm

    Oh no, I really could cry for you that is really awful.
    This is my absolute faviroute blog becasue i just love everything you write about, and ive followed here for so so long so im really sad too :(.

    I REALLY hope you can work things out :) :)

    xxxx

  15. Leefe November 25th, 2009 11:01 pm

    Which reminds me it’s about time to start getting a backup system in place… If my hard disks crash, that’s the end orz

  16. Adun November 26th, 2009 8:30 pm

    I sometimes worry about my own hard drives as I have a lot of data in relations to work. Though of course I do keep multiple copies around its still not good when one fails.

  17. tacos November 27th, 2009 12:26 pm

    LAST tool you can use ddrescue no space no underscore
    http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

    It will start on blocks right away. Pulling off blocks. as a disk image.

    luck be with+

  18. soloista November 30th, 2009 3:41 am

    So if your hard drive takes nearly forever to get detected by the PC… (yes, still works somewhat, but there’s a detection problem), will these tools work too?

  19. tacos December 1st, 2009 11:21 am

    Yes Solo. Though these tools even work if your computer does not show the harddrive on the desktop/ folder. The terminal would show it. If not. Well then. That’s a different matter.

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