Death of a Digital Darkroom-- Update
Image courtesy Wix.com
So you may recall, a couple of weeks ago (the day after I was released into the wild by my employer at Cube World!), the hard drive on my desktop PC gave up the ghost. I was really upset by this, since my new-found freedom from the corporate workworld was my green-light to get busy working full time on my photography goals. After all, the PC is my main workshop, my "digital darkroom", and also the main storage site for my images. It's also the primary place I do most of my writing for this blog, or uploading new images to the website. So when the desktop PC is down, a good portion of my workstation is unavailable!
A peek into my Digital Studio, on a happier pre-crash day
And yes, I do have an external hard drive to back up photos to, and I recently set up a Dropbox account, which I haven't used mush yet. The bad thing about this recent crash was-- I hadn't done a proper backup to my external drive in at least 7 months. Yup, that's 7 MONTHS' WORTH of images, apparently lost forever!! OMG!! This was horrible. Sure, I could stillpromote my work on Instagram and Facebook, either on my phone or another device. Fortunately, I have an Acer tablet and access to my husband's laptop. But my Canon utilities were installed on the dead hard drive,and of course-- all my digital babies, completely unaccessible!
The dead drive, WD Caviar Black, but only 500 GB. Was pretty top of the line....7 years ago!
My new drive, from the WD Blue line. Probably should've flipped for the extra ten or twenty dollars to stay in the Black line, but I can upgrade later to a solid state drive.
Well, I researched hard drives feverishly, and decided I wanted to stick with Western Digital, the maker of both my external storage and dead drive. A solid state drive, at least 1 or 2 terabytes, was my goal. If I have to replace a 7 year old drive, I might as well upgrade, considering what I use the PC for the most. Unfortunately, due to the reduced income situation at the time, I decided to go with (as a temporary solution) a regular HDD, just to get back up and running soon. However, I did stick with the 2 TB option,because although it's a temporary solution, "temporary", or the time it takes for me to afford an SSD, might be a bit longer than I can anticipate. Finally settled on a basic WD Blue 2 TB drive. My daughter picked it up for me the next day (we also were down a vehicle this week....when it rains, it pours sometimes!), and a couple days later, had it installed and ready for me to put Windows 10 OS and my basic most-used programs on it, so ImaginationRanch Photography could get back into business!
Windows10 OS image ©Microsoft
Downloading an .ISO copy of Win10 was an interesting adventure in itself. Once I found a clean resource for it, it was apparently going to take eons for it to burn to a USB flash drive I planned to use. After spending most of a day trying to get it going, and losing patience with it when an Internet interruption caused it to stop downloading, I finally decided to restart it at bedtime and hopefully wake up to a flash drive full of Win10 goodness the next morning. Which is exactly what I woke up to.
That next day, I spent the best part of the day installing Win10, and then one by one, all my Canon programs, PhotoFiltre7, and various other necessary tools. Finally, back to some semblance of normalcy!
Canon Digital Photo Professional 4....came with my Rebel T6
PhotoFiltre7, an editing program I have used for years, that I love
My favorite browser was Google Chrome, and I still like it. Use it on my tablet. But when I acquired this desktop, I was introduced to Opera. It is fantastic! Try it!
After making sure the next couple days that all systems were go, the external drive was good to go, and my camera apps were all in place, it was time to do what I promised myself in that last post-- purchase the product key to DiskDigger© for a mere $14.99. Once I had that program open, I spent the day familiarizing myself again with its features, and trying to figure out the best way to approach the daunting task of image and document recovery on a hard drive crammed full of important and not-so-important stuff. Considering when a drive crashes, anything that is recoverable is now scattered to the four digital winds in an unorganized fashion, with no recognizable file names attached, this was going to be a challenge for certain!
I began to let DiskDigger© scan the entire drive. Mistake. I do not have the next 5 years to wait for a good 12 years' worth of digital content to be recovered from a hard drive. Ain't NOBODY got time for that! So, I restarted the scan after a couple hours of that stupidity on my part, and rest the scan for just .jpg images. Let's go after the photos first! Well, that was still going to be around 10 years' worth of images. I shoot a LOT of images. I don't delete or throw away much of anything. Again, no time for this.
"Let's be reasonable, here", I told myself. I looked back in my external drive to see how far back and which shameful date I had last backed up images, made note of it, and began to sort through the scan to find the most recent in that time frame. Much better plan!
I believe now I have recovered all the lost images that DiskDigger© showed as recoverable. There are still some that are either in a "damaged sector" or "unrecoverable", according to the program. I went ahead and saved the image files in a folder dated and named as my Recovered Images file, since none of them have any of their previous identifiers on them any more. They all appear to have been renamed as the sector the scan located them hiding in. This is going to be a pain in the @s$, somewhere along the line, when I want to find certain images! But as I do, I will just have to rename them and file them in an easily located file for future reference. It'll make for a nice rainy day activity, or something to occupy the time next winter, if I don't get it all completed between now and then. At least it's only 7 moths worth! Considering I can average about 500 photos or more in a month, that is a helluva lot of photos! But for the paltry $14.99 I shelled out for the unlimited product key, having my images back is well worth it. They were mostly all located, and when recovered, appear to all be original file sizes too. Yay!
So, for about $100 and maybe 32-40 hours worth of work, the digital darkroom of ImaginationRanch Photography is back up to speed! To anyone who runs into the same kind of traumatic situation as I have recently, I wholeheartedly recommend purchasing the DiskDigger© program key. You won't regret it.
Now, if I could just get my fitness routine and my personal "get up and go" back up to par.....!