All gone... ALL Gone.
Geminii23
Posts: 1,328
in The Commons
So the worst thing that could happen... happened. I lost the most important Hard Drive in my computer. Lost pretty much the last 5 years of my life. Every project I ever did in DAZ, gone. Every piece of 3rd party content I bought or got from free sources, gone. And if memory serves me right, RTDNA is no longer even in business.
Pretty depressing.
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Oh man! I'm SO SORRY! :( That sucks so much. Wow - I think I'd probably rage quit if I lost all my stuff.
Ugh. I feel your pain.
Is there no way you can take the drive to a tech person who might be able to retrieve some of it?
Yeah. I actually did 'Rage Quit.' This happened back in June. Haven't had time or energy to start trying to start all over. Not only did I lose everything for DAZ, I lost every professional Video project I have edited in the last three years. I already brought the drive to a data recovery place. They couldn't fix it and said the drive needed a clean room disassemble. No guarantee that they would even recover anything but the cost would be close to $1500. Thanks. But no thanks.
The DAZ content I am not worried about since I am reinstalling that with DIM. But all the 3rd party stuff from RTDNA (especially everything I bought from Aeon Soul - can't remember their original name from before) and losing all the actual DAZ project files... That stings. Bad. Can never go back and do anything with those again.
That is bad news I'm really sorry for you. was it a SSD drive or a hard disk.. a hard disk can be recovered fairly cheaply . I never heard of anyone doing recoverys for SSD drives though/
I have had it happen to me once.. But just once now I make a shadow copy of my complete computer once a week. and back up my daz content folder every month. IHard drives are cheap compared to the frustration and heart break of having to start over again... I wish you luck. and hope your recovery is quick and full. once you do start making back up it won't be so painful next time.
No it was a regular 3TB drive. But since none of the conventional recovery methods works, they would have to send it to a clean room. Big money.
Luckily I found out that Rendo stills has all download links to stuff I have purchased from them going back to 2012. Thank god. Does anyone know if all the RTDNA content is being added into DAZ? I thought DAZ bought them out. If so, that might be an option for me to get my stuff back.
*HUGS TO YOU* I am so sorry to hear this. It's always a tough set back to lose so much time and effort. Sometimes even with the best plans, things can go awry (been there, done that!)
The best thing you can do now is reframe it. Look at it as an opportunity to start fresh and do things in new ways, maybe even better than before. I know it doesn't bring back what you had, but maybe it frees you to move forward.
wow $1500. really where do you live?
Yeah. Live in Phoenix now.
Thanks. The only reason I am even trying now to get things moving again is that I just finished a good script that I want to turn into a graphic novel. So I felt really inspired to jump back into DAZ and start creating again.
You could try getting a price quote from a different recovery place. No clue what a normal charge is, but just in case the first place was simply more expensive, it's worth a shot, worst case you've just wasted some time finding out.
Also, while now isn't the best time to start making backups, it's better than never and may help you in the future.
I don't know what needs to be done for recovery, but perhaps there's somebody with the tech knowledge and interest you know who can try it at home; if you decided you couldn't afford a professional service and are going to discard the disk anyway, then the risk of damage or failure goes away in a sense. I wonder if there might be some useful information about recovery services or DIY options here: http://forum.hddguru.com/
Keep in mind that there are a LOT of freebie sites as well -so if you find yourself light on content that you need to flesh out your scenes, there are a ton of freebies available. :)
Good luck on the script. That sounds fun! :)
Ugh that sucks. I just lost one of my exterior drives which had all of my pictures from our vacation on it (we don't get to go often), all of my daz projects that I did on the laptop, everything from at least 6 or 7 years. Totally sucked. I still haven't loaded any free stuff back to the laptop but most of the Daz library is up and running. Fortunately, the C drive is fine so it kept all of my custom categories. Or I would still be working on it. I have a second external on my pc which is my main rendering machine. I am a lot more comfortable having two externals although I still don't necessarily trust them either.
@Ivy, how does one do a shadow copy?
You should probably contact the drive manufacturer and see how much thet charge for data recovery. (They should be able to recover just about anything short of the platters being cracked from excessive trauma, or a powerfull magnetic data wipe. (and if I remmeber correctly at least with Western Digital the recovery cost includes the purchase price of a HDD to recover the data onto.)
That's a good idea. Didn't think about that. I will reach out to Seagate (ugh. never buying their drives again.).
So does anyone know if RTDNA content is being added to DAZ?
Sure is! https://www.daz3d.com/runtimedna
Also I believe they retained customer data. Couldn't hurt to look into merging your purchases if you still know your RDNA information.
They have moved here already: https://www.daz3d.com/runtimedna
Ok, so then what happened to all the content I bought from RTDNA originally? Also, don't see a lot of stuff that I had such as Aeon Soul's stuff.
A lot did come over. If you open a ticket here and give them your email address at RDMA you should get anything you purchased that came over.
Edit: Not all artsts from RDMA came to DAZ and at least one has since transfered some (or possibly all) of their products elsewhere so the sooner the better.
Awesome. Thanks.
But not all stuff came over - some PAs chose to move their stuff to another store. You could try contacting individual PAs for stuff that didn't come over - you never know.
And sorry to hear about the hard-drive. That reminds me that it's time for another double-back-up. I need to buy another new external drive - amazing how quickly a Tb goes when you get one.
I wouldn't stop buying Seagate just because of one drive. Ever since the early 2000's when they bought Maxtor, their quality has gone up exponentialy (not sure how it worked out though as both companies had bad track records before that). For my laptops I use exclusively Seagates in my laptops for 2TB storage drives.
Now if reliability is your need, then I would reccomend getting Western Digital Gold Enterprise Class Drive. WD expects you to run that drive 24/7 for the entire 5 year warranty. And it's rated for 550TB workload per year.
Right now I'm looking at the 5 year warranty on my 500GB Western Digital Velociraptor running out in a couple of months.... (time to shop for a replacement)
Oh man, that's one of my biggest nightmares. I keep all of my Scene files, finished pieces, and downloads on a 4 bay Drobo (it's a box that holds 4 drives in an array so the information is backed up on multiple drives so if one dies you don't lose everything) so I don't have to worry about losing everything if a drive fails. There are lots of options out there for a similar system, I highly recomend everyone that has any kind of files they don't want to lose to look into getting one. I also have all of my scene files backed up to my google drive (that reminds me, I need to update that backup) so that I have an offsite backup of at least those just in case.
Back when I was working retail computer repair $1500 was the going rate for a clean room level data recovery from the big box I worked at, and all of the quotes I saw from other places were similar. But that's also been 7 years and there were very few places that could do that kind of work, so the price may have gone down since then.
Yeah it really does blow when you lose stuff, I had lost 500 gig of stuff a while back.. Is why now I have about a ten or so external drives so I have my data backed up safely..
I just bought two 4TB Seagate drives, one for backup
I have failures with every brand but fortunately having backups of most things have kept me sane.
I live in Phoenix, AZ as well. I assume you went to Data Doctors. They are expensive, but they get the data. A few years ago, my parents hard drive stopped working. The hard drive with all the family photo, genology, music, email, everything. Data Doctors was able to restore the 200 GBs of data, but it cost a little over $1000. They do charge by how much data they recover.
In windows 7 ,8 and 10 you can find the settings for making a shadow copy of all your hard drives in your control panal> back up and rerstore> system restore. > then click make system image copy, that will make a exact copy of your hard drives.
Wow, losing everything really sucks.
Just to give some more not-really-useful-after-the-event advice, I protect my HD by subscribing to carbonite.com . Now, every file I put on my PC is automatically backed up to the cloud. On-site backup is great, but what happens if you have a fire?
I just replaced my circuit board when mine died. http://www.hddzone.com/ My husband usd his electrical meter to check the fuse thingies and the 2nd fuse still had power, so we knew that the hard drive had just blown one of it's fuses. You can't use the hard drive any more because it's not reliable but I was able to get everything off it.