NUUUUUUUUUOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!.... ALL MY DATA!...

[mugenjohncel]

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[DaFool]

Oh shit, you serious?

This really really is baad.

I feel for you.

Dammit, man, don't you burn backups of your psds regularly, or email them to yourself?

[PyTom]

There are some suggestions for tools you can use here. They seem like crapshoots, but maybe better than nothing.

Whatever you do, do not use the hard drive. Boot off of a different hard drive.

[Misuzu]

For future backup purposes: =P
Off shore SVN repository. (Wiki on Version Control and Subversion)

Remote SVN in a datacenter of sorts with RAID 5 backup on your drives is your friend. Much cheaper then buying a RAID 5 setup for your own house if you don't already have a decent collection of large hard drives (assuming you know someone who can provide it). Programs like Tortoise SVN make using SVNs extremely easy (just point and click =D), and it could probably be taught to a newbie in about 15 minutes.

And as an added bonus, not only does it back up your data, it keeps a version history of your data so you can see the changes you've done and revert back to an older version of your data if needed be (and it allows for multiple users to work on a project with minimal overlap issues).

And once again, I'm not trying to advertise (though, I guess until I get that services page up for VisualNews, theres no way people would know I even do this >_>;; ), but if you've got a visual novel related project and want a offshore backed up SVN repository, we provide free ones. Just PM if your interested. (Must be willing to listen to be babble for at least 30 minutes xD).

As for data recovery itself... Norton Ghost is a fearsome adversary =o. I had some good cluster recovery software from a while back and I'll see if I can find it... but it all depends on how many clusters you have left after disk imaging T_T.

[mugenjohncel]

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[PyTom]

Yeah. You have a perfectly valid (if empty) NTFS filesystem on your drive, so simply mounting it isn't going to do much. You have to use tools like the ones I linked that can see past the nice, juicy, valid filesystem, and attempt to make sense of the debris underneath.

[Misuzu]

Ayup, Ghost should have formated your drive, so theres no reason for Ubuntu to be able to see anything. The only way your going to get data back after that reformat is to use software that looks at the clusters of data left after your reformat and tries to put them back together (which is essentially what all the software mentioned in the thread PyTom provided does... hopefully). How much of it you can recover all depends on how much Ghost had to use on that 80GB HD for the process of making the image and where it chose to store that data.

[mugenjohncel]

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[monele]

Yurk... good luck with this ... We've all been there at some point. If you don't write anything on the old HD, it should be "easy" to salvage I think.

[Blue Lemma]

Good luck... that sucks

[mikey]

This is terrible, sad, frustrating, annoying and demotivating. Incidentally, only yesterday my USB stick broke and needed to be formated - with a lot of data lost - but I was able to recover completely everything on it with EasyRecovery without any problems.

Anyway, I usually burn everything on DVDs whenever I have enough to fill it, I don't trust any magnetic drives whatsoever. Not because of accidental deleting, but the problem of the drive breaking - and simply having and extra HDD doesn't do it for me, not in the long term. It's not impossible that both of the drives can break at the same time.

I do have a backup every once in a while on a HDD, but primarily I use optical, since they can never really break completely, even an old optical drive will have some data that can be salvaged - but I periodically test mine and reburn them if they are already a bit old, plus I really treat them like princesses.

And I don't use any backup software. Just simple copy/burn and so.

[PyTom]

I currently have a 3-fold backup solution.

The first step is that I keep a USB hard drive mirroring my main hard drive. It keeps roughly the last 10 days worth of backups, but keeps the current backups as files, which will make recovery easier. (Theoretically, I could pop this hard drive into my system, copy some files around, and be good to go.)

The second step is that I keep important files (my thesis, Ren'Py, etc) in subversion on my Texas server. That's offsite backup, and that's important. Both Misu and I are offering people offsite subversion repositories, and that's a very useful way of preventing data loss. It also means you can recover the state of your project any time you checked it in... that's handy if you make mistakes and want to correct them.

Finally, releasing is a good way of backing up. I figure if push came to shove, I could always ask someone with the latest Ren'Py version to send it back to me. (This is an argument for including scripts and stuff with released games.)

[papillon]

hrm, time to dump files to my USB stick again...

I've got two projects that are routinely backed up to a flash drive. Would have been to an external drive as well but the one we bought was making funny squeaky noises so we're currently having it replaced. The source code for Fatal Hearts is also sent to the subversion thingie when there are updates - I don't send the graphics, though, I don't want to overburden generosity.

I should probably also dump everything business related to DVD every month or two. I haven't quite managed that diligence yet. Did burn it off when we sent away the external drive though...

[DaFool]

Yeah, I also figured releasing the game IS the backup. Also, when you're in a collaboration, sending final original files to each other makes each other your backup.

Curious, there is a reverse auto-archiver for .rpa files, correct? For emergency purposes.

[PyTom]

Curious, there is a reverse auto-archiver for .rpa files, correct? For emergency purposes.

I have an unarchiver tool, although I don't distribute it publically.