What a weekend...

Aremis · Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2006 8:59 pm Post subject: What a weekend...

OK - Wanted to share.

Recently I purchased a new laptop, to ease my film work when on the road.
I neglected a lot of my graphics work for a few weeks, and my main machine.

So on Friday evening, decided to sit down and do some texture work. Add a new hero or two to the downloads.
For an FYI - I run two external 500Gig hard drives, apart from the internal 150gigs I have. Lots of space, lots of room to grow.
I first started by launching Photoshop. I kept getting errors that it couldnt initialize.
So I decided to just be smart, and reinstall it.
Still didnt solve the problem.
So since I hadn't done a clean install in over a year, decided it was time to format the main drive and start clean. Only takes about an hour to do everything. No big deal right?
After everything was reinstalled, Photoshop running 100%, connectivity back and all, in just over an hour, by primary external drive, that houses everything, from my portfolio to my extensive 9 year collection of Poser files, wouldnt mount.

I connected it to the laptop, same thing.

When I ran my disk first-aid on it, it was returning errors gallore. I spent 7 hours trying to fix it and salvage it.
Finally, around 2am on Friday night/Saturday morning, low and behold, I managed to recover nearly everything.
Only one major hickup.
Since there was serious fragmentation to the drive, and to the Hiarchy DB, Disk First-Aid couldnt figure out where the files belonged.
So it created a folder called
"LOST+FOUND"
And what did I find inside this folder?
I found every Character, every pose, every prop, every texture, every geometry file I have ever installed. No in a neat little collection sorted by folder, like Poser does.
Nooooooo.....
......
....
....
EVERYTHING in one simple folder.
EVERYTHING!!!!!
Do you hear me? No multiple folder containing geometries.
No neatly and cleanly organized folders containing categories of thousands of props, free, purchased, created.
No well laid out folder plan containing every texture file ever associated with a download.
Noooooooo....
EVERYTHING...IN...ONE...DAMN...FOLDER!!!!

Without a joke, I have worked from 6am Saturday morning until now, without sleep, recovering everything.
Luckilly, I was able to go back and get everything I purchased from DAZ, Rosity and PP back with no hassle and right quick too. That allowed me the chance to at least get a game plan in order.
Figures, poses, props, materials, faces, hands - They were all easy to do.
But do you know how painful it is to go through each one of those, in Poser, load it, and wait for the message to locate the Geometry?
Or to locate the textures? And then have to memorize where its suppose to be located, and manually create the directory, and then go search through more than 400 000 files, find the right ones, move them, and try again?
ITS PAINFUL I TELLS YA!!!
PAINFUL!!!

But the toughest was fixing all the injection morphs for the Unimesh series. I just gave up and re-downloaded them from DAZ (Thank goodness for download history).

Well - I wanted to share.
My dearly devoted girlfriend was very sympathetic, but I think it was just to confusing for her to fully understand how tough this was (And could have been expensive too).

Luckilly - None of my Photoshop textures WIP's, or completed projects, were lost.

But I did lose more than 8000 MP3's.
Those...well...Those were kind of like...Ummmm...Borrowed?
So I now beleive in bad karma, boys and girls.
DO NO...DO NOT STEAL MUSIC!!!!
It will wipe out your hard drive and send you screaming into the night!

Thanks for listening.

:cry:

_________________
=============================
New World Media/Muskateer Graphics
~Live the dream, experience the nightmare
=============================

Ratteler · Forum Member Joined: Jun 10, 2002 Posts: 561 Location: NYC

I've been bitten like that about 3 times, so I feel your pain.

Backup
Backup
Backup

Ya gotta do it.

I have a fire wire drive set aside just for my Poser stuff. Every month I copy my current incarnation of my Runtime drive onto it, and every six months I burn the whole bastard to DVD-R.

I also keep a folder set aside just for new freebies and stuff I make.

When it hit's 4 Gigs, it gets the DVD treatment.

I do a simular thing with my music too.

I'm about to pull my main drive out of service too. My Windows is screwed to high heaven. Time to reinstall everything from scratch.

The good news from one Drive FUBAR survivor to another is that this too shall pass.

Best of luck.

GhostofMacbeth · Forum Member Joined: Sep 21, 2001 Posts: 619

I feel your pain, sorry to hear. I think I have had a similar but less intensive thing once but it wasn't fun. Backups are good though. My backup system sucks though so it will be a pain if anything happens. The runtime should be fairly set though, as of 6-9 months ago though.

GlitchGirl · Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:43 pm Post subject:

Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch.

I've got just about everything backed up on both CD and DVD (installers only), but damn I'd hate to have to reinstall all of it, especially after I got the libraries more or less like I want them.

Pulling the whole thing together from a massive pile of data... ouch.
_________________
"Flash, quit heckling the supervillain!" - Green Lantern
The Ether Forge: http://www.stkp.com/POSER/

Aremis · Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 4:52 pm Post subject:

I do usually backup nearly everything of importance - Unfortunatly, that many years requires more than a DVD backup. Even my dual-layered disks are too small for my collection of purchased items.

I did lose quite a bit after playing around. Lots of OBJ files are gone - Some I was able to redownload of course, but since I started with Poser, I have had 3 accounts with DAZ, because I kept losing my login information, changing emails ect. So some stuff is gone forever - Others are now safe and sound.

Im heading out onthe weekend to purcahse another terrabyte worth of drive space - Most likely two 500gig drives again, just for storage. You know youre a file whore when you have more than 3 terrabytes of storage, and never enough space =).

Thanks for the kind words all.
_________________
=============================
New World Media/Muskateer Graphics
~Live the dream, experience the nightmare
=============================