Harddrive crash with my P2 footage on board... any suggestion and help appreciated

Justyn

Justyn

Veteran
Greetings all.


Murphy awoke yesterday and slammed me pretty hard. My G5 Mac media drive crashed bigtime. I was able to summon it from the dead with the use of some programs- Disk Warriors, Norton, and then the beautiful savior Data Rescue 2. Now, I was able to salvage 40 gigs out of the 60 gigs of P2 footage that I had on the drive. I backed it up to a stable drive and then again to DVD-R.

Now, my question is for those able to edit in FCP and familiar with the P2 workflow and elements.... I'm supposed to be receiving the FCP upgrade in the mail today or tomorrow.. so I'd like to have things somewhat together in the hope that FCP can deal with my bigtime mess of data... so here's the questions. Any and all info appreciated.


What additional steps can I take to hopefully make this 40 gigs readable and importable through FCP?

Is there a way to either recreate, modify, or correct the last clip text file with each? Is this a necessity for importing?

Also, if a file is missing from the disk, will it render all of the other clips unable to be imported?

Any other helpful info would be greatly apprecaited....




This certainly was a learning experience. I had backed up everything prior to this last P2store dump to DVD-R... I was being lazy as I didn't want to back up 15 DVDs. I think that this harddrive crash was also due to me dragging all 15 partitons to 15 folders and dumping at the same time..... Maybe created a bad sector or something....


So a painful lesson learned early on. Redundant backup is a PLUS. I'm going to be buying a new harddrive. I like the G-raid. Anyone else with a suggestion?


I do know though that the 3 mac programs are awesome. I highly recommend data rescue.. man that has come in handy a few times.


Thanks everyone and I hope I can atleast salvage 2/3 of my footage... Only my bad karma can fail me now... BUT, it's a chance to do some much needed spring cleaning and hopefully get everything together in time for FCP....
 
Until Panasonic figures out a decent archiving solution, I have a feeling that throughout 2006, we're going to see more and more posts just like yours.

Hard drives are terrible archiving solutions and like you stated, burning a giant stack of DVD-R's for one project is a pain.

I'm sorry for your problems. I HAAATE the feeling of suddenly hearing a strange whir and a click coming from a hard drive. Panic sets in and you find yourself praying and cursing and promising you'll ALWAYS back everything up ALL the time if you can just save your data NOW.

I'd help you if I could.
 
Raid 5 and Raid 10 were invented for a reason - if you want security in your data, you use these methods. A fireproof safe is also a nice addition.
 
Thanks everyone. I have had some good news. Maybe 1/4 of the shots have been able to be imported into FCP... that I got today. Seeing as how we overkilled that shoot, and I have 2 hours of other footage. This 3 hours of footage i have shouuld be enough for 3 minutes edit.. lol


Man, I will have to check into those redundant raid systems... This sucks to have to deal with this right now...

Come on Blue Ray.... Until then, you'll never hear me ***** about backing up to DVD-R... I'd gladly have spent the two hours doing it over the 20 hours I've been working on this blasted thing....


This does mean I'll be able to get some stuff out to clients though.. and I have a package coming to you HVXguy.


thanks again alll.. and hopefully my pain is someone else's bit of advice.. and forthought...
 
Here's a question.

What type of external drive were you using? or was it internal?

I am very picky about the external's I buy. Such as, I know a lot of people who bought Maxtor drives, and they have **** the bed a lot.

I tend to go with La Cie (even though I had an issue with a solder point on the power board once, and had to buy a new enclosure.) or Custom ICE drives made by Melrose Mac here in So Cal (www.melrosemac.com)

I might also consider the G-Tech drives at the apple store, but those suckers are $$$ compared to La Cie.
 
The drive was an internal SATA drive. I don't really like firewire externals. I've had trouble with the Lacie's as well. Got one that I will smash soon at 60 fps along with a few other pieces of crap.

I will get something decent for my new media drive. I've had trouble on my internal G5 drives... Too much heat and such. I'll keep it in a raid.


I thankfully got atleast 30 minutes imported into FCP... Phew! What a terrible way to spend 2 days though...

Thanks all and I hope this is the last time I have to report this bad news!
 
good news on getting some of that footage back.

I need to stress to everyone that DVD-r backups are a mans best friend. And when HD-DVDs and Blueray are more common it will be less of an issue to have disk backups.
 
Thanks guys.. I'll check it out. I won't also complain about backing up to DVD-Rs now... Just a part of the bleeding edge!

Jared.. so right about blue-ray. That will be an awesome solution...


Finally too. I picked up a sweet USB 100 gig pocketdrive from seagate. Maybe 200 bucks locally... Its small, powered off the bus, and copies very fast. It's great for the P2store offloads on my PC laptop.. and theres no problem going back and forth between the PC and the Mac. Makes live so
much easier.

Thanks again brothers. Everyone take a lesson from poor old Justyn... Back it up.. take the time... and don't put it off. My drive went to crap in like a couple of days.... Over time, I'm sure it could have been really bad news!
 
By the way, turns out TDK is the first to go with the Blu-ray media here's a quote from the anandtech site regarding the shipping of 25g disks:

The high-sensitivity inorganic recording material utilized by TDK for the write-once type BD-R is completely different than the recording materials used for CD or DVD. TDK Blu-ray Discs’ inorganic material is impervious to light, making the discs exceptionally well suited for archiving data. Composed of copper and silicon, TDK’s exclusive CuSi recording material delivers remarkable, long-lasting performance. The recording material enables fast recording and playback speeds and also makes it possible to realize massive capacities through multi-layering.

Pricing on the media has also been released for the BD-R and BD-RE at $19.99 and $24.99 respectively. Later this year, TDK will ship the 50GB media at $47.99 for the BD-R media and $59.99 for the BD-RE media.


This will help alot in the archiving effort all of us must have to endure...





 
Jazzx.. that's some great news. So are they making a rewritable version as well as a one time write?

I remember my DVD days when I was paying 8 bucks a piece... 5 packs for 40 bucks and I'd get bad burns... That was expensive... I hope this will be reliable and have somewhat manageable record times..

I think up to an hour or maybe 90 minutes would be good.. More than that would really stink!
 
DriveSavers is a good option if you are working on a -very- well funded project. I recently suffered a internal raid array failure and turned to them for a quote at recovering the footage. The array in question was a 3-disk 1.2TB Raid-0 config. They assured me they would be able to recover the lost data, and then quoted a fee with a range of $16,000 - $28,000. I decided to re-capture the footage.
Cheers
 
That would have to be very well funded indeed. I came across the same kind of thing here... locally. I got a quote of 3-5K... for one crappy little SATA drive. The gig isn't even paying me that.... so I'm just glad I shot overkill and that even the 30 minutes I rescued would be enought to put together a 2 minute happy face video..... PLus I remembered that we also shot 50 minutes of Mini DV... and then I had backed up 3 cards to DV in the camera... And then coupled with the previous shoot, which I did back up to DVD, I have about 3 hours to edit down... and it's going on regular DV anyway.


Man.. A lesson learned. I also have to be more dilligent about defragging and maintenance. Kind of sucks though that Norton is no longer supporting Mac. Nothing above 10.3 I believe...
 
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