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Recovering Hard Drive Files: How do you do it?
Here's a problem you'll be lucky not to come across in your life as a computer user - losing your data, data loss, hard drive failure, or some vindictive ass deleting your shit.
Can your files be recovered? Did you even KNOW you had files to lose? Hey don't laugh, some folks don't know.. they just go "I need my computer fixed" and they can't even interpret what's wrong in order to communicate a basic assessment with a tech or repair desk person.
Well, a friend of mine had his engineer incur exactly this type of problem: an engineer that justified his hasty departure over unmet salary expectations recently refused to go to an out-of-state studio the day before without an increase, was then disciplined by being sent home without pay the remainder of the day.
But before the guy grabs his lunchbox to walk out, he deletes his computers' partition and reformats, thinking that the company will lose all the work on that PC.
He didn't handle his under-compensation well, allowing his frustration with the company to undermine his reference and repertoire with the owner, and imploded. When the owner learned of the fracas, he terminated.
Now, one could say "yeah fuck 'em, he got screwed so screw with the company" but I'm seeing neither side handled the issue very well. Now there's a fucked-up computer nobody can use because of the possibility that a reinstallation of WinXP would over-write the freshly destroyed data, rendering all files totally unrecoverable.
Now I know a few methods of restoration.. but first lets see what ideas you guys have up your sleeve!
Hard disc drives (we call 'em HDD's) are definately the new Ampex 456 for musicians in the modern age. We used to rely on tape to store everything permanently, and even though most HDD's rate their median time before failure @ 300,000 hours or so, we fail to think we'd actually ever meet that end of a ticking timebomb.
We think "hey, it spins up, why worry" but in fact, some drives made 20 years ago are still in use. I have a Western Digital 30 mb drive, 1988 in fact, I haven't thrown out. It still works, just don't run it every day.
But hard drives can and do fail.
For one thing, the "heads" are merely floating coils of just a FEW wraps of wire over a finely-polished crumb of aluminum - very similar in construction to your original tape heads in a multitrack machine. But instead of energizing particles of oxide on polyester tape, the HDD head energizes oxide particles on spinning aluminum platters.
These platters spin so fast, the rotating surface creates a micro-turbulance of air that cause these heads to actually float as they wipe back and forth rapidly across them on the arm that controls movement.
But this action does come with the trade-off of moderate temperature elevations, and some of the faster and most desirable drives that are made for audio-visual editing ("a/v" rated drives) generate tons of additional unwanted heat.
Heat is the destroyer of all things electronic. And as the glues, insulations and soldered connections are made brittle with heat, they are bound to break.
So then the MTBF-rating on hard drives becomes sort of a benchmark, as in "all things considered" you'll see 300K hours of use before failure; ".. so long as you don't shake the drive while it's hot and accessing data" you'll see such long life.
But in some situations, and especially studio scenarios which can become harsh with spilled beer and wine, blood, cum and other bodily fluids and hard objects knocking around - 300K/hours of operation quickly becomes an unrealistic expectation.
Frustrated?
Outdated?
Newere bullshit overrated?
Let's have some fresh TAWK about your drive problems and mine.. or in this case, my local engineer's sabotage.. can we recover files or not!
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