Crashed external hard drive.

Hey, someone I know dropped one of my external hard drives. Now it doesn't work. My back-up of the movie footage stored in there crashed as well recently (a PC -- won't even power on). The external hard drive contained all of the footage from my first indie feature film "Nowhere Johnny" (which is now available to watch here: NOWHERE JOHNNY on INIDEREIGN ) and losing the footage sucks because it's my first serious indie feature, now all the original footage is gone, and I want it back.

So when I plug in the external hard drive, at times makes a clicking noise and it doesn't even show up on my Mac Mini. The power light is on though. Other times, there is no noise and this message shows up on my Mac: "The disk you inserted is not readable by this computer." It pops up at least twice.

Is the footage gone forever? If not, how do I get it back?

This is the external hard drive brand: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-External-STAC1000101/dp/B0045JLPN8/

It's simple. Go to the backup and retrieve.

If you didn't do basic data management:, you can try taking it to a data retrieval/restoring company and see what they can do, but that can cost you a lot and it's unlike they're going to retrieve everything, if anything. It depends on the damage to the unit. If you're lucky and you've only damaged the electronics and not the platters, you might get lucky and recover everything.

Expect to be gouged. Last time I looked into it, the cost was prohibitive. Probably more than your no-budget for your film.

It's simple. Go to the backup and retrieve.

Click to expand...

Could you elaborate? Thanks

What he's saying is, why did you only have one copy?

If you want the footage back, you might be able to have some recovered, at a fee of likely $3000+ from a data recovery service. Beyond that, you're most likely pretty well screwed.

Especially considering how cheap hard drives are these days, there's really no excuse to not have multiple copies of things that you might actually care about losing.

2TB+ for $100.. etc.

Could you elaborate? Thanks

Click to expand...

Go to your second copy... CTRL-C and then CTRL-V. It works on both a Mac and a PC.

Will's spot on. It sounds like you don't have backups of critical data, so this will be a lesson learned, I'm sure.

oh wait.. hold up.. you have a backup on another machine? Pull the drive from the other machine, and get yourself a drive dock to drop it into... should be able to get one in the neighborhood of $30-40.

Then, for the future, you can just buy bare drives (cheap), put them in the drive dock, dump footage to them, take 'em out and put 'em in safe or on the shelf, whatever.. best to rotate drives every year or so at a minimum, and ideally you want more than one backup for really important stuff.