Wish me luck - 2 years of backups gone

New HDD arrives today.

I ‘accidentally’ hit format on the wrong drive (my 2tb backups and not the SD card) so lost 2 years worth of drone and GoPro video.

Looks like its fixable with Disk Drill on the Mac, so I’m gonna have a few beers tonight and see what I can rescue.

Any suggestions on anything else that does a good job, OSX or Windoze?

I’d avoid the beers! Biggest cause of lost data there is! :wink:

But, gutted for you!

I often moan about the fact that, over 5 drives totalling 14TB, I have so many duplicates, triplicates … and more, but … it does reduce the chances of losing everything.

I really should invest in a NAS RAID setup … but probably won’t get around to it.

Can’t advise on best recovery method … luckily I’ve not done that in a while.

Lost a few pics last summer after my main backup from MP and cameras, my laptop, went US … but at least everything that had been backed up to it was recoverable when I got a new laptop.
Without the laptop, I bought an expensive load of memory sticks and managed to muddle them one day … beer related … but only lost some 15 or so pics.

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I’m usually so anal about backups that’s the gutting thing.

I have a NAS RAID set up but it’s only 1.5tb and acts as a media server for the house and all the photos etc, I just use the drone and GoPro that much that it eats space hence the external drive option.

Recovery software looks to have found everthjng however it has not been able to recover original folder structure or any file names, not sure about the exif info until I can have a proper look later.

Most of it is just flying local, the only stuff I really want back is some drone footage from France and GoPro from Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Getting it back might the easy part, the difficult bit will be sifting thorough 20,000 jpegs and 1500 videos for the stuff I really want and making some sort of directory sense of it all (but that’s what night shifts are for).

Going forward I might have to upgrade the NAS drives to a couple of 6’s not cheap though :slightly_frowning_face:

If it has the file, it should have the exif … it’s embedded … unless you’re referring to the MP’s separate pano exif files … that I’ve never found any use for.

On windows, Bulk Rename Utility can create file names from the embedded exif Date Taken date/time … you could at least home in on important dates quite easily.

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Watch this space, and thanks for the info :wink:

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Incidentally, if they’ve been lost, you can use that same utility to reset the file date stamp to the same date taken data … all in one pass.

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I have a Mac utility does the same , ‘A better finder rename’ just need Amazon dude to arrive with new drive to play the shuffle game, SSD MacBooks are brilliant until you need a couple of TB to move around

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Talking of losing data …

Removing 128gb, rather full of 4k, card from MP - my finger nail slipped off the card and it FLEW!!!

Luckily this was in the house and not out in the wilds, somewhere … I thought. And that would be an issue.

But, in my semi-renovated house, I’m living on bare floorboards, and after about an hour of looking for the card on top of the boards, it became apparent it had slipped through the cracks.

But which one … and where!

After lifting 6 boards, on an every third board, and stuffing my head and torch down beneath each and between each rafter … I did find it.

8 hours that took! LOL!

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That’s probably about the same time it’ll take me to sort the data on mine.

Drill Doctor indeed does work and found all the jpegs (19500) all still have date and time taken as well as camera info so they are easy to sort into folders. Although for some reason the jpgs were all found as MPO files that have the main photo and preview ‘lumped’ together. I’ve just renamed all to .jpg and it seems to have worked

The video is a different story. It’s found about 1000 of them and maybe 40 or so are unreadable, all have been recovered as mp4 instead of mov files which I realise is just a container file and not a problem, only thing is they carry no info or exif data so I’m gonna shift them into 2 folders one for drone and the other GoPro.

Lesson learned I’ve now renamed all external drives with the prefix xxx_, if the police coming knocking I’m in big trouble but when I have 2 or 3 of them plugged in I know what not to format, my mistake was brought about my naming them CF_2TB and SD cards CF_32GB, I just got clickly happy in disk utility and formatted wrong one.

Luckily the lesson only cost me a new LaCie rugged (been after one for a while) and 6 or so hours of my time (and the 17hrs the scan of the formatted drive took)

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I lost a card while swapping, unfortunately was not so luck to retrieve it.
I’ve got a habit of pulling the card out and holding between my lips while I put the next one in.
This time for some reason I breathed in and it went to the back of my throat and I ended up swallowing it.

Thought it best to write that one off rather than trying to retrieve it.

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Oh crap! :stuck_out_tongue:

Ditto! … but I don’t swallow when I have a DISK in my mouth! :rofl:

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Now I’m left wondering if it would have worked. Hmmm.

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I was holding a Micro-SD card, 20 minutes ago, when the phone rang.

Luckily it was only a 64GB one I’d just taken out from the laptop after copying the contents …. because I can’t find the little bugger!

Edit: Then I discover one file Hadn’t copied. #Meh

Second Edit: 3 hrs 30 minutes of crawling about on my knees …. it is found! :+1:

/me makes a mental note not to trust anyone on this thread with his data

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But - I find my data! So “recovery” is my expertise! :+1:

who said that…