Posted by Kelly Rowe on September 10, 2007 at 3:00 AM
It's late Friday afternoon. I'm burning a DVD of the RAW files from the shoot we had just done. Finder says the burn is complete and I eject the disk and try to switch back to Aperture. Nothing happens. Okay, I know Aperture can be a pig so I wait... and wait... and wait... I try to click up another application so I can get to the Force Quit screen to kill Aperture, but nothing happens. 20 minutes or so go by and I want to go home, so I use the power switch option and shut down my Uber Mac. After a few seconds I switch it on and it goes through the grey screen, then the blue screen, shows Starting Mac OS, etc., but that's it. Nothing more. I start it in single user mode and run fsck, and get some very upsetting results. Search for the install CD and boot it from that. Run the Disk Utility and get more unpleasant results. Run the Disk Repair utility and learn that I'm hosed. Well, not me, but the node structure is hosed. The boot drive has failed after 3 months.
Today it was off to the local Apple service center for three new SATA drives that I'm going to configure in RAID 5. It looks like I'll be able to mount the damaged drive in the forth slot after I've got the venerable Mac Pro back up and transfer a lot of the data to the RAID set. I was able to browse it successfully from the console when I booted up in single user mode. It looks like the bad sectors are not on the data portion of the disk.
Take away from this that I am so freakin' anal about backing up every shoot as soon as it comes off the cards, that I could recover everything I've shot if I needed to. Some of the upsell work I haven't sold yet may need to be redone if I can't recover it from the damaged drive, but that's not so bad. I enjoy doing it and will likely do a better job second time around.
The moral of the story... Your drive(s) will fail. Shoot. Upload. Burn. Do not pass go, do not collect $200 until you have your most recent shoot on 2 DVDs stored in separate locations.
While on the general topic, chimping isn't a bad thing. Someone near and dear to me (downstairs) did a baby shower with an 8 gig card thinking that would be more than enough. She shot the entire thing watching the previews with histograms and they looked perfect. Had she chimped a bit she would have noticed that after about 30 shots the card failed and wasn't recording any more images. Of course the camera was set to not shoot without card (another learning process) but it thought the card was present. So, some of the most important images were gone (like the 4 generations of women shot).
Sorry for being such a gasbag tonight, but as my old Pennsylvania Dutch mom used to say, "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today."
Scary stuff, Kelly. We're as "anal" as you about backups because we live in a place with lots of volcanic dust already on the ground and stirred by any dry breeze, plus lots of volcanoes nearby threatening new deliveries (check out this map to appreciate Kodiak's location). Volcanic ash EATS hard drives for light snacks. We don't reformat cards till they are copied to at least one desktop, one laptop, a portable drive, a DVD and usually a portable download device like the Epson P2000. On top of that we have to worry about tsunamis from all that tectonic activity, so we archive DVDs of important images long term in a safety deposit box here on the island as well as another location far, far from Alaska.
Paranoid? Not if "they" really are out to get you! We'd use the same backup system no matter where we lived, because volcanic ash and tidal waves aren't the only threats to hard drives.
Posted by Tim Stenning on September 10, 2007 at 1:40 PM
Makes me want to rush off and buy Aperture. What do you think was the ultimate cause of this "hosing"?
Tim Stenning
Forks, Washington
Posted by Adam Kavalunas on September 10, 2007 at 10:43 PM
This WON'T happen to me. I still use that film stuff, no aperature, no memory cards, God I love it!
Posted by Crystin Slade on September 11, 2007 at 1:06 PM
I download using explorer from a Sandisk cardreader - first to a USB external disk on my ntebook, then to the notebook. Then over to the PC, and on to 2 separatehard disks. I hope to set up a RAID system soon wiht SATA disks, and will get another couple of external disks.
I am a computer programmer, and do not trust any hardware at all - or OS come to that :-)
Bestest wishes
Crystin
Posted by Kelly Rowe on September 11, 2007 at 3:34 PM
Tim,
The "invalid node structure" error is the Mac equivalent of a corrupt file allocation table in Windows. It can occur if power is lost during a write to disk, like using the power switch option to stop a runaway computer. Root cause is me.
Posted by Tim Stenning on September 12, 2007 at 1:00 AM
These computers have their pros and their cons. But I know one thing, they're here to stay. Constant learning. Tim
Ironic, I have 6 months of recent work on an external HD that went sour yesterday., I am sick about it., I will spent 1000 on a recovery that is not guaranteed, but sure wish I had a back up.
Discussion
7 repliesToday it was off to the local Apple service center for three new SATA drives that I'm going to configure in RAID 5. It looks like I'll be able to mount the damaged drive in the forth slot after I've got the venerable Mac Pro back up and transfer a lot of the data to the RAID set. I was able to browse it successfully from the console when I booted up in single user mode. It looks like the bad sectors are not on the data portion of the disk.
Take away from this that I am so freakin' anal about backing up every shoot as soon as it comes off the cards, that I could recover everything I've shot if I needed to. Some of the upsell work I haven't sold yet may need to be redone if I can't recover it from the damaged drive, but that's not so bad. I enjoy doing it and will likely do a better job second time around.
The moral of the story... Your drive(s) will fail. Shoot. Upload. Burn. Do not pass go, do not collect $200 until you have your most recent shoot on 2 DVDs stored in separate locations.
While on the general topic, chimping isn't a bad thing. Someone near and dear to me (downstairs) did a baby shower with an 8 gig card thinking that would be more than enough. She shot the entire thing watching the previews with histograms and they looked perfect. Had she chimped a bit she would have noticed that after about 30 shots the card failed and wasn't recording any more images. Of course the camera was set to not shoot without card (another learning process) but it thought the card was present. So, some of the most important images were gone (like the 4 generations of women shot).
Sorry for being such a gasbag tonight, but as my old Pennsylvania Dutch mom used to say, "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today."
Paranoid? Not if "they" really are out to get you! We'd use the same backup system no matter where we lived, because volcanic ash and tidal waves aren't the only threats to hard drives.
Tim Stenning
Forks, Washington
I am a computer programmer, and do not trust any hardware at all - or OS come to that :-)
Bestest wishes
Crystin
The "invalid node structure" error is the Mac equivalent of a corrupt file allocation table in Windows. It can occur if power is lost during a write to disk, like using the power switch option to stop a runaway computer. Root cause is me.