When Disaster Strikes: Oops I deleted all of my footage two weeks ago!!!
12.21.2009
Scenario: Two weeks later you realize the footage you deleted off of your desktop is somehow not backed up anywhere!! Now what?
CF cards the media used for recording with the Canon line of DSLR's are a very robust media. They can withstand a lot of punishment that a DV tape never could.
Due to the cost of CF cards, however, you need to be constantly offloading the cards and backing them up. The importance of this was driven home to me at Re:Frame San Francisco by Den Lennie , the tapeless workflow guru and co-founder of F-Stop Academy . During his presentation he talked about the majority of problems with this type of media boiling down to one thing, human error. Well, anytime I do something good, or take part in something I am proud of, I am very quick to toot my own horn. Why should it be any different when I do something bad? Really bad. We had a few consecutive jobs that put us out in the field and had us juggling our Seagate 1 TB drives like a circus performer. Everything was backed up at least twice across 2 MacBook Pro's,an iMac,a Mac Pro with a RAID 5 Array,four 1 TB Seagate Drives and
two 500 GB Seagate Drives. Seems like a year or two ago that would have lasted us a lifetime as far as storage goes. Well not anymore. The Mac Pro was filled to the brim and therefore I could no longer edit on it properly. I called my partner in crime,asking what could be deleted off of the desktop. The answer was "Make sure Everything is backed up before you delete anything!" I did. I checked and double checked. Everything on the desktop was backed up on external drives.
Delete.
I then began working on the task at hand. Fast forward two weeks.
I am starting to work on the next job in line.I go into the folder and... empty. "Hmmmm, that's weird." I thought. So for whatever reason I check another project folder on the external. Nothing. Another. Nothing. I am officially at DEFCON 1!!! Alarms are going off! I'm officially freaking out!! It feels like my life is over.
It's too painful to remember everything I lost that day. Lets just say it was about 450 GB of video footage that I could never recreate.
If I would have shot these on a regular video camera I would still have the tapes. Damn you!! I cursed my ambition. My reliance on this new technology and my idiotic finger for hitting that delete button. In an utter panic and in between sobbing uncontrollably(some details have been altered for dramatic impact) I turned to Twitter. I downplayed the severity of the situation but my sheer panic must have resonated because in a matter of minutes I had a number of replies. They ran the full gamut from, please tell me this is a joke, to surely there's a backup somewhere, to condolences on your loss. Then I got a direct message from @CodyPChristian. It said he had a similar problem once and was able to recover his files. We went back and forth as he diagnosed the problem. What OS are you on? Where were the files? Back and forth.Back and forth. Then he sends the Tweet heard round the world.(some details have been altered for dramatic impact)
Data Rescue II. Two words and a Roman numeral.That was the solution. I ended up using Data Rescue III just because it was newer and I felt like I needed any new developments in technology to save me as this was a hopeless cause in my mind. The most tedious part of the entire task was going into the preferences and un-checking the majority of the massive list of files this thing can recover/reconstruct. I was only interested in Quicktime files as I wanted this thing to just focus on recovering all of that footage that was lost. It cost $99 but this thing worked a miracle. It recovered over 450 GB of information that was gone!! It had a specific search function for just such an occasion aptly called Deleted Files.
This tale serves a few purposes. Always,always,always back-up. Then back-up your back-up's back-up before you ever even think about hitting delete. If you do find yourself in this predicament, and you are using Mac OS, Data Rescue III worked a miracle for me.
Lastly,but probably the most important, I owe a huge thank you to @CodyPChristian This guy does a little bit of everything check him out at http://codypchristian.net/ He didn't need to help me out. He gained absolutely nothing from doing that, other then the satisfaction of helping a poor sap out that just deleted a lot of valuable footage. Regardless,he spent his time to find out what my problem was and to find a solution for me. That speaks volumes to me about the kind of guy he is,his character and willingness to help out when he can. So for data recovery I recommend Data Rescue III. For virtually anything else I recommend http://codypchristian.net/
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6 comments:
Question I've been thinking about. Back in the "day" people charged clients per foot of film used. Then we charged for tapes. I also remember charging a storage fee for hard drive space on the avid, back when we only had 8GB of storage. So today, do we charge clients say $200 for 2 TB of storage? And then just keep their original files indefinitely? What about when these flash cards get to where they will hold about an hour for $25? Do we then just charge the client $25 for a card, and then keep the files on the card- as the ultimate backup. Just wondering what everyone else was doing these days.
You know- I'm a stills photographer (although we're a dying breed I suppose) and I have the same problem. When shooting back-to-back jobs for clients it is so hard to make sure everything is backed up. The greatest problem is that the volume of Data is so great that so quickly the biggest problem (for me anyway) is the TIME commitment required for a proper backup. When backing up 50-500 gigs of data on the run, at the airport in the taxi, etc.. it gets out of hand. You might have footage, and a certain number of large size files, but at stills photographers we might have thousands of individual files to follow around. It's horrible.
Needless to say, perhaps its time to charge clients for the media you shoot on. They get their own dedicated Hard drive, dedicated flash card. It would solve so many things if we could go back to shooting on some sort of material that could be then considered a "master" of some sort.
-dennison
Fashion photographer, Prague, Milan.
www.dennisonbertram.com
well it is good to know that there are some ppl out there who "jumping in" (so to say) and helping out, no matter what ... and ppl who "publish" this.
we are still tape-based ... but there will be a time (very soon) we are also going to "shoot on card". so thx for this (particularly for the link) ... and i'm glad that things did work out for you.
so ... how often do you check your backup backups now-days?
great blog post jon. this is defiantly an important issue that i battle everyday.
my solution so far, is to buy small usb bus powered external 500GB western digital external hard drives.
as i fill these $90 drives up with footage, i name them and store them in a pelican case like a bunch of old fragile books. i even add little moisture eating packets to the pelican case.
i use a simple pad of paper to log that is on each of the drives by name and date of vids shot.
that is how most of my footy is backed up and archived.
i am now moving toward using XDCAM disk and the write back feature of the $2,800 Sony PDW-U1 usb drive. i love the $60 dual layer 50GB XDCAM disks and feel super confident that my data will survive for hundreds of years on disk, even if i drop the disks down the stairs by mistake!
this method is much more expensive, but when shooting video for clients that involved many people and tens of thousands of dollars to produce, it is a must. XDCAM for me, thus far in broadcast television, has been flawless.
as for shooting on sxs or CF cards...until sandisk extremeIII cards/ sony sxs cards become very cheap, i do not see anyone using them as archival solid state storage.
your blog is looking great, nice job and i hope we get to meet at nab 2010 this spring.
tom guilmette
Great info, Jon. Thanks to Cody and the incredible community that steps up when we need it!
Really glad it worked out for you, an incredible lesson to us all. Thanks for sharing how you worked through it.
'J-dog
www.twitter.com/Jdog23
Good read and lesson that I will take to heart prior to DELETING. Thanks for sharing this valuable info. Some people would probably start heading toward the bridge but seems like this software is a savior. Going to check for it now. LOL.
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