Losing invaluable work

805Drummer

Gold Member
About one and a half years ago, I was on the phone with an Apple tech, trying to get my camcorder to work with iMovie. There were about 20 folders of video, that wasn't anywhere else but on my camera. The support person said that all of these were the same, and that I just had to back up one, and could delete the rest. Unfortunately (VERY unfortunately--to the point of tears), they were not all the same. That evening, I lost literally thousands upon thousands of clips--almost a years worth of completely priceless comedy sketches.

Fast forward to yesterday.

Yesterday, my camera crashed while we were making a movie, and everything that is now on my camera was deleted. Needless to say, I feel like I just lost a beloved pet--it's truly a terrible feeling, knowing that DAYS of hard work--just GONE.)

Has this happened to you before? Whether it be movies, music, anything? How did you handle it?

Also, did you attempt to restore it? I'm trying to restore these myself, but it's not going so well.
 
Since I lost over 8000 songs I had stored on my iPod, I have three 500GB external hard drives I back everything up on
 
what was your camcorder recording on????

surely if it was DV tape (a standard amongst most cameras) you can re-capture the footage?

also, backing up onto a external drive is ALWAYS a good idea. get some software that prompts you to do so or add a reminder on youre calender/ phone.

or get a mac with time machine..... but thats another debate all together!
 
The ipod loss has happened to me. I had loaded 6,000 songs, and then plugged it into a new pc. I didn't even think to check that itunes default setting was "synch" which means my ipod was synchronized to a blank library.

The worst loss, however was a *massive* database I had on 390 people in one of my squadrons. This young IT/administrative person (kind of a goth/wicca chick) was placed in charge of a data migration. She was relocating to a new base soon, so she didn't care, and her supervisor was brain dead.

She proceeded in nuking 6 months of hard work and another 6 months of tweaking to an access database. everything was corrupted beyond repair and we had to start from scratch. Her brain-dead hog of a supervisor didn't have the intelligence to put her on administrative hold and have her reload the database. That priveledge, was left back to us. Wehn I say reload, I mean manual re-entry of all data for 390 people.
 
what was your camcorder recording on????

surely if it was DV tape (a standard amongst most cameras) you can re-capture the footage?

also, backing up onto a external drive is ALWAYS a good idea. get some software that prompts you to do so or add a reminder on youre calender/ phone.

or get a mac with time machine..... but thats another debate all together!

It's a JVC Everio -- recording onto a 30GB hard drive.

And I have a Mac and use Time Machine; I just didn't have it the first time I lost the movies, and then yesterday, the data got lost while I was making it, so it would have been impossible to save it.

It was *kind of* my fault though, because you're supposed to reformat the camera every two or three months, and I hadn't done it for two years.
 
The ipod loss has happened to me. I had loaded 6,000 songs, and then plugged it into a new pc. I didn't even think to check that itunes default setting was "synch" which means my ipod was synchronized to a blank library.

Woah, what did you do? Surely you didn't buy the 6000 songs again?
 
Woah, what did you do? Surely you didn't buy the 6000 songs again?

Those songs were ripped from my cd collection. I never went through all that ripping again. I kept it to a hundred songs or so.
 
unfortunately I think losing data is something we all go thru and hopefully learn from it. I'm a computer tech and I always tell people it doesn't matter what make your computer is, what it cost or if you built it yourself using handpicked parts...DON'T TRUST IT!!!

Backing up is boring and tedious but not to do it is asking for trouble. I keep my personal data on my hard drive but also on an external drive, 2 places are better than one. Remember, external hard drives are still hard drives and subject to failure. I have over 2000 CD's and they're all ripped to a hard drive which I use to play music and you can bet your butt that I had that drive backed up to an external drive, and I only turn that drive on when making backups. No need for it to be running all the time.

Retrieving lost data can be time consuming and even expensive of you can't do it yourself. Make backing up your data a regular procedure. You surely WON'T regret it!
 
unfortunately I think losing data is something we all go thru and hopefully learn from it. I'm a computer tech and I always tell people it doesn't matter what make your computer is, what it cost or if you built it yourself using handpicked parts...DON'T TRUST IT!!!

Backing up is boring and tedious but not to do it is asking for trouble. I keep my personal data on my hard drive but also on an external drive, 2 places are better than one. Remember, external hard drives are still hard drives and subject to failure. I have over 2000 CD's and they're all ripped to a hard drive which I use to play music and you can bet your butt that I had that drive backed up to an external drive, and I only turn that drive on when making backups. No need for it to be running all the time.

Retrieving lost data can be time consuming and even expensive of you can't do it yourself. Make backing up your data a regular procedure. You surely WON'T regret it!

Yes, Time Machine makes it very quick, easy, and efficient to back up stuff and retrieve it. Although I didn't have my computer back then when I lost everything. Good thing I know someone who has a business similar to Geek Squad who can probably help me restore everything.

I just hate the feeling in your stomach you have when something like this happens. No kidding, I could barely sleep last night!
 
My god 805 tears would not be the word, and a techie saying that over the phone, I'd have to physically be there to tell someone to do that. I've worked in IT for over ten years and touch wood I've been pretty lucky

One nightmare I had was in the UK I backed up an old laptop, about 20gb worth onto several DVD's. Checked each one, yep all good............

Fly like ten thousand miles away to live in Aus, nothing on the DVD's!!!! I lost the lot, they had data somewhere as could tell from the bottom but they wouldn't open!!!!

Nightmare

JVC Everio, one thing I don't like about this camera is storing into a MOD format, so to edit in Premiere Pro CS3 (my weapon of choice) I have to convert it. Plus Premiere Pro didn't see the JVC camera so had to capture elsewhere and then I had audio synch issues in Premiere

ha ha sorry going off topic
 
The ipod loss has happened to me. I had loaded 6,000 songs, and then plugged it into a new pc. I didn't even think to check that itunes default setting was "synch" which means my ipod was synchronized to a blank library.

That's why I wouldn't want an iPod, iTunes or anything like it. I like to be in control of what goes on my MP3 player. I don't trust computers with things like this.
Unless things get really complex, I also don't use any computer program to do my maths for me. Unless it's numerical, but in my experience the analytical capabilities of most mathematics software (Maple, MatLab and such) are about that of a slightly backward donkey.

I am also the kind of guy who writes appointments down using a pen and a physical agenda.
 
losing important data can leave a humongous lump in anyone's throat, aisde from the feeling of being so helpless. Not a good experience. Computers are great tools but one has to always keep in mind that they are subject to failure or serious problems at any time and without warning sometimes.
Learning what to backup and how to back it up should be on top of everyone's list. Like I said, I'm a computer tech, built my own computers and they run fine but I trust them as far as I can throw them.
 
My god 805 tears would not be the word, and a techie saying that over the phone, I'd have to physically be there to tell someone to do that. I've worked in IT for over ten years and touch wood I've been pretty lucky

One nightmare I had was in the UK I backed up an old laptop, about 20gb worth onto several DVD's. Checked each one, yep all good............

Fly like ten thousand miles away to live in Aus, nothing on the DVD's!!!! I lost the lot, they had data somewhere as could tell from the bottom but they wouldn't open!!!!

Nightmare

JVC Everio, one thing I don't like about this camera is storing into a MOD format, so to edit in Premiere Pro CS3 (my weapon of choice) I have to convert it. Plus Premiere Pro didn't see the JVC camera so had to capture elsewhere and then I had audio synch issues in Premiere

ha ha sorry going off topic

After I realized all the clips were gone, I called Apple again, and in desperation, demanded compensation. They sent me a $50, limited-edition iPod video case (probably the coolest case EVER), which, sadly/ironically, someone stole from my locker last year, along with the iPod that was in it.

And yeah, I HATE the stupid MODs on JVC Everio. The backup program I'm using now to recover the videos recognizes the MODs--it can even save some of them to my computer. The problem is, my video converter, Visual Hub (best program ever) doesn't recognize them because they're not the same MODs they once were.
 
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