A real life disaster - backup those photos!
 

Hey Folks

Just thought I'd report on a disaster that happened on my trip to Namibia last week. I took my Jobo GigaVu Pro Evolution and used this to transfer my photos from CF card each time they became full - a total of 1500 photos over 5 days - birds and wildlife.

On day 5, disaster struck. Probably due to the heat, my Jobo hung whilst in my bag during data transfer. The device was really hot, so I switched it off and cooled it down by opening the back and removing the battery for a bit. However, when I switched it back on I heard a "nightmare" noise - one that (being in IT) I recognised is the noise when the hard drive head has fallen onto the platter. Oh no. No backups.

I have tried all manner of things to recover the photos and am now waiting for a particular screwdriver I need to get inside the Jobo so I can remove the drive and slave it on the PC (I don't care about invalidating the warranty, I just want to see if I can get my photos). I don't hold out much hope - the only other option would be to pay money to send it to someone who can see if they can swap the platter onto another hard drive unit.

So, chances are I will have lost all 5 days worth - 1500 photos - of my trip. So the moral of the story is please, please, if you go on a birding trip and use some kind of photo storage device, do make sure you have a backup device, otherwise you stand to cry a lot like I did!

Anyone else ever had similar happen to them whilst out on a shoot?

Didi
p.s. I have put this on birdforum.net too just in case people there don't read this as a reminder of importance of backups.

What a nightmare!

Try putting the drive in the freezer for half an hour, THIS IS NOT A JOKE, (remove the battery first). Put it in a loose fitting polythene bag but don't seal it, while it's in there set up your download cable to your PC and have everything ready for a quick download, make sure your drive battery is fully charged ! After about half an hour, remove the drive from the freezer, quickly refit the fully charged battery, plug in your download cable, switch on the drive and attempt to download your files to your PC as normal. You may need to go through this procedure several times before you retrieve all the files that are available, you may not recover them all. This is usually a last ditch attempt at file recovery from a drive that's mechanically knackered. If this works, dump the faulty drive and replace it with a new laptop drive. I've managed this procedure a few times for desperate clients, works sometimes, depends on how badly damaged the drive is.

Don't dump the drive just yet, there may be other work rounds you can try. It may be that your hard drive head crash has just corupted some of the sectors on the drive platters, if this has not caused any serious mechanical damage it can be possible to recover some or all of the sectors using a small piece of software called HDD Regenerator v1.51, you can download a trial version of this at the following web link. http://www.sharewareriver.com/products/13005.htm

I've used this software many times, it can be a life saver for what seemed to be an unrecoverable hard drive, it does work!

Good luck.

nirofo.

Wow Nirofo - that's really useful stuff - thank you so much :-))))) Never heard of the freezer thing - I wonder how that works?

Okay, I will certainly be trying these things and let you know what happens.

Thanks again
Didi