I lost an award ceremony 5 years ago when I was in Austria at a
regatta. Card wouldn't mount.
PhotoRescue to the rescue. $35, download, recover files, etc.
Either people contact you and then find out they can do it
themselves, or they've got backups and are willing to abandon the few
items not backed up, or they are just throwing everything, unedited,
onto their externals and realize most of it is such junk they're
better off without.
More recently, however, I lost my entire external master file backup
to a corrupted drive directory. I keep my master image files on a 2T
drive which is always attached.
The maker of the drive suggested I use a recovery service - $500.
The maker would replace the drive on warranty. I had the files
backed up on DVDs both on site and remotely, at a friend's house. It
was a toss up between shelling out for a restoration or spending 3 or
4 days rebuilding the data on the replacement drive.
I returned the drive to the maker and bought a Glyph drive and
rebuilt the files. My time is worth less than the recovery service.
The maker sent a replacement drive which turned out to be my drive -
fixed by them. I wish they'd told me what the problem was. They
left no hint.
Glyph is a drive assembler which only uses Seagates. They're big in
the video and music recording industry and have an extremely
widely-held positive reputation for assembling drives that don't
fail. Their 3-year warranty includes data recovery!
The drive with the directory corruption was from OtherWorld Computing
- the most respected purveyor among Mac users. They are also an
assembler but they use whichever brand of drive they feel is the best
of what's available when they assemble. So one case might contain a
Seagate while another might contain a Western Dig.
Both the drives have a wide variety of ports - FW800, eSATA, FW400,
USB 2. I use them with FW800 and piggy back other drives on them,
especially my dedicated Time Machine drive which automatically backs
up my computer HD every 60 minutes following a complicated algorithm
developed by Apple to sort through the drive data and only replace
that which has changed during each interval.
I can't see the Cloud becoming useful until I have much faster upload
times. DSL is way too slow for a shoot in which I have over 6G of
keepers. And then there are the security, and power problems with
the concept.
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races
http://www.landsedgephoto.com
Check out my Spring daily photograph project at:
http://tinyurl.com/3a6m7g6
And Summer:
http://tinyurl.com/22juo5s
Autumn now complete here:
http://tinyurl.com/26pdgz9
Winter concluded here:
http://tinyurl.com/2co5wkg
