Computer woes

So I get a call from our drummer Doug tonight. Doug also serves as our recording engineer, and we do all of our recording at his studio.

He tells me that the hard drive on his recording system crashed. The computer cannot see/locate the hard drive at all, and he also lost a fan in the process. He is now swapping the hard drive into one of his computers he has in the house. If it works, then he simply needs another hard drive.

Why is this a bummer, you may ask? Simple. All of our music that we have been recording is on that hard drive, including music that Doug and Andy have done together going back 15 years. And if he cannot get the hard drive to respond, then we have potentially lost all of our tunes.

I did some digging on the web, and it looks like the costs for data recovery services start at around $350 to $500, which none of us has. So unless Doug can somehow rescue the data, it looks like we might end up re-recording all of our tunes from scratch.

Oh man! Let us knows if you can recover them!

reminds me of when we had a fire in our house and we lost everything old. All pictures, all videos pretty much everything that was in the room that got smoke and water damage....

as to the HD crash, I know this sounds stupid but let me say it anyway.

I read in a CNET article that someone put their drive in the freezer, and honestly I tried it on a laptop drive that stopped responding...it made the drive work just long enough to take the data off and put it in an external drive...worked for us but for you..I dunno.

Those DRS companies actually take the drive platters out and create another drive and it is labor intensive, that's why it costs $$$$

Hmmm....I'm not too sure if Doug will want to put the hard drive into the freezer, but I guess anything is worth a shot at this point.

I talked to Doug again today, and it's official. The hard drive is toast. Blech! But he will hang onto it in case we get the money to do a recovery.

So we're trying to look at this in a good light. Now that we've all been playing together for a while, we've become even more polished, and the tunes have evolved a little bit. So this might be a good thing for us to re-track the material anyways, since we can do an even better job than before.

And thank Goodness that Doug has two extra hard drives he can replace the broken with! At least we have that much going for us!

greatest computer invention in the last 10 years ........

maxtor one-touch backup drives.

for about $100 you can get plenty of space to store everything, wipe a lot off your computer hard drive so it runs faster, is easily retrievable anytime (just plug it in to a usb) and easy to bring old files in when you buy a new computer / hard drive.

they shud send me a chek for that plug.

i use them at work for all the embroidery files (because they cost about $70 - $150 a graphic), one for home computer, and one for the bands music.

AH! All is not lost!

In his infinite wisdom, Doug has just located backup files he put onto DVD's of nearly everything we have done as a band together! So now it appears that we have to maybe re-track two tunes, but this beats the heck out of having to re-do everything! He has also installed the two new hard drives into the computer, where one will serve as our recording drive, and the second will be for backup. Whenever we record something, we will have it on both drives in case one of them goes south.

Also, he put a third, smaller hard drive into the computer where the operating system will reside. The idea is to keep the recording files in their own place, with no chance of anything mucking them up. Since he does not use the recording computer for the web at all, it should stay pretty clean.

Whew! What a relief!

I'm a computer geek, so I won't go into RAID, mirroring..etc for important stuff, but at work we have our server mirrored so when the employees and emails are saved, they go on 2 computers located in different parts of our building at the same time, and a network drive in another building just in case of fire, flood, earthquake.... But most big businesses are prepared for that as we are.

my external drive that contains my stuff now is here, but I have a copy of this drive also at work "just in case", as years ago we had a fire and I lost a lot of cool pics, CD's I burned, VHS tapes, cassettes not from the fire but smoke and water damage, and I vowed never to let it happen again.

yeah ... nowadays, networking to space and just having more / separate space is relatively easy and cheap. even if its burning to cd's like eric sed.

now its just the issue of actually motivating ourselves to do it.

thats cool bro ... it sure beats having to re - do everything.