HD crash stalls Foxtaile; crushes Unseen

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Taleweaver · #1 Post by **Taleweaver** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 6:11 am

Hi everybody,
my HD died last Monday, and I don't have the money to recover everything from it. Essentially, I'm going to have only one file rescued that is essential to my mother's shop, and the rest will go down the gutter.

Unfortunately, that means that all my files for Foxtaile and Unseen are now gone too. The Foxtaile project hasn't been hit too hard - EsperKnight still has all the text and story structure and Rio/eclipse still has all the character art. All BG art is lost, unfortunately, and I can't seem to contact qq any longer, so the project is going to take even LONGER until completion.

As for Unseen, I've lost around 150 pages of text, i.e. everything I wrote so far. I had around two thirds of the entire story completed, and I feel no motivation to write everything again. That'll teach me to backup my files. Unseen, however, is not going to see the light of day. It was a controversial story, and I'd have loved to publish it just for the sake of feedback, but it's not going to happen any more.

If someone still needs a kickass idea for a truly original visual novel, contact me under taleweaver[at]animeacademy.com.

#2 Post by **PyTom** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 10:24 am

My unhelpful response... ouch. How much would it cost to get the files recovered? When I worked at a computer shop (half a lifetime ago, give or take), we would always offer this to customers, but they never took us up on it, so I never found out how much it actually cost.

See my thread on free subversion repositories for my more productive response.

monele · #3 Post by **monele** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 3:53 pm

Ouch indeed

... At least not all is lost but it's very sad news :/...

Taleweaver · #4 Post by **Taleweaver** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 4:53 pm

PyTom wrote:My unhelpful response... ouch. How much would it cost to get the files recovered?

Around €1000 for the entire HD, between €250 and €500 just for the essential files. And no, I don't have the money lying around convieniently...[/url]

monele · #5 Post by **monele** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 6:38 pm

THAT MUCH ?? o__o... It's more than the price of the HD itself @_@; *faints*

mikey · #6 Post by **mikey** » Tue Dec 20, 2005 4:13 am

It's a rip-off, I know myself, I have lost my HDD several years ago and that recovery service was quite new, so it easily topped the cost of a new disk. Thing is, they supposedly rely on companies that must have those files, that's why for someone who lost their work it's just over the top money.

I'm sorry for the loss. Anyway, whenever I lost my files, I have somehow always found the power to make them again - such as my music or so. I'd let it be for a few weeks, maybe you'll find motivation. Actually, I wrote/rewrote Gakuen redux completely three times, so... if you believe in the story, the motivation should come back.

Now I have my USB stick to avoid such things...

I learned.

ShiraiJunichi · #7 Post by **ShiraiJunichi** » Tue Dec 20, 2005 11:48 am

....ouch... tough break man...

Is RAID a cost effective method for consumers? Anyone know how to connect IDE hard drives to a RAID controller? (it is possible, right?)

#8 Post by **PyTom** » Tue Dec 20, 2005 12:05 pm

The thing with RAID is that it protects you from hard drive errors, but not from errors that occur between the chair and the keyboard. Say you accidentally delete a file... it will be deleted from all the drives in the RAID array within moments of each other.

For desktop machines, what I do is have two drives in them. Every day at around 4 or so in the morning, the data from the working drive is mirrored to the mirror drive. This way, if I accidentally delete something, I have until 4am to get it back, or to cancel the synchroniziation process.

If you decide to go with this method, you MUST automate it. A backup not performed does not help anyone.

I do run a RAID-5 array on my fileserver... I use software RAID under Linux, so there's no need for dedicated controllers. It works well enough for my purposes, even though the fileserver is only powered by a K6-2/266. (For energy and "had it lying around the house" reasons... more the latter than the former.)

ShiraiJunichi · #9 Post by **ShiraiJunichi** » Tue Dec 20, 2005 1:31 pm

PyTom wrote:The thing with RAID is that it protects you from hard drive errors, but not from errors that occur between the chair and the keyboard. Say you accidentally delete a file... it will be deleted from all the drives in the RAID array within moments of each other.

So... there's no recycle bin with RAID? ... weird...

PyTom wrote:For desktop machines, what I do is have two drives in them. Every day at around 4 or so in the morning, the data from the working drive is mirrored to the mirror drive. This way, if I accidentally delete something, I have until 4am to get it back, or to cancel the synchroniziation process.

So how would I configure this for a Windows system? If the first drive is partitioned, would I still be able to mirror both drives onto one drive? I just got a new 200 GB hard drive, so maybe I would consider this method...

#10 Post by **PyTom** » Tue Dec 20, 2005 2:14 pm

ShiraiJunichi wrote:So... there's no recycle bin with RAID? ... weird...

Recycle bin? Recycle bins don't help if a file is deleted from the command line, or overwritten by a rogue program, or...

(Plus, I use Linux.)

So how would I configure this for a Windows system? If the first drive is partitioned, would I still be able to mirror both drives onto one drive? I just got a new 200 GB hard drive, so maybe I would consider this method...

Dunno, offhand... I wrote my own script to do it for Linux.

ShiraiJunichi · #11 Post by **ShiraiJunichi** » Tue Dec 20, 2005 3:57 pm

PyTom wrote:Recycle bins don't help if a file is deleted from the command line, or overwritten by a rogue program, or...

Oh, you were talking about command line deletion or viruses or whatever else- I see now.

RAID also has performance improvements- and doesn't require having twice as much hard drive space as you actually need. But if you're not a fileserver, then a daily backup sounds more reliable.

absinthe · #12 Post by **absinthe** » Tue Dec 20, 2005 4:07 pm

PyTom wrote:If you decide to go with this method, you MUST automate it. A backup not performed does not help anyone.

This really made me think... my usual backup method is "we're going away for a couple of days? Let me stuff everything I care about onto my flash drive real quick."

So today I put together a rudimentary automated back-up system for my computer (running Windows XP with two hard drives). All I did was create a .bat file with xcopy commands in it, then set up a task in the Windows task scheduler.

Windows is a bit tempermental sometimes, so I'm giving it a few days before I rely on it to any extent.

mikey · #13 Post by **mikey** » Tue Dec 20, 2005 5:00 pm

PyTom wrote:Recycle bin? Recycle bins don't help if a file is deleted from the command line, or overwritten by a rogue program, or...

... or too big for the bin
... or (which applies to me) when someone uses SHIFT+DEL as standard ^_^

#14 Post by **PyTom** » Tue Dec 20, 2005 7:09 pm

mikey wrote:... or (which applies to me) when someone uses SHIFT+DEL as standard ^_^

That's beacause Real Men don't need confirmation dialogs or safety nets. Real Men know what they want, and Real Men are always right... even when they're wrong!

absinthe · #15 Post by **absinthe** » Tue Dec 20, 2005 10:52 pm

Hey, I talked to a computer savvy friend, and he suggested, maybe, if it's a software problem, trying PC Inspector (free) or GetDataBack for NTFS. He said if the hard drive is making clicking noises or doesn't show up in the BIOS (???), it's probably mechanical, so those wouldn't help, but I thought I'd let you know just in case.

When his hard drive crashed, he hooked it up to mine and used GetDataBack to recover a lot of the information on it. Might be worth a try?

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HD crash stalls Foxtaile; crushes Unseen

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