File Disaster

Posted on 2003/11/23 17:06:10 (November 2003) by john.

It was an accident waiting to happen... and it happened.

Much like anyone else, I'm pretty relaxed about backing up files, taking the standard "oh I must get round to that some time" approach, but never actually doing it.

All of the digital photographs (as well as video clips and sound samples) that I've taken since I got my first digital camera in the Summer of 1999 are stored in one place. OK, a lot of them are also on the web, but these are typically scaled down versions, and are generally only pictures I think might be of interest to other people. So a significant proportion have only ever been stored on the hard drive of my PC. Which I don't ever bother to back up properly.

I think you can see what's coming. Yesterday, horror of horrors, I clicked on my "Pictures" directory, only to be told "Access Denied". No real suggestion as to why, but, as far as Windows was concerned, I couldn't get at anything within that directory tree. Agh.

It was a terrible heart pounding moment. I went through all the usual things - looking at the access rights, checking the disk, scanning with my virus checker, booting up in safe mode and so on. As far as everything was concerned, there was nothing wrong with my system or my hard drive, but that directory (and that directory alone it seemed) was just not accessible. I tried restarting a couple of times, unplugging my network cable, all of that, but nothing changed. Windows just wasn't going to let me get at my pictures. In fact, as far as it was concerned, they weren't even there.

Despite my panic, I had something of an inspiration. On one of the many tedious times I'd recompiled the kernel for my linux installation, I'd vaguely remembered turning on an option that was something to do with experimental support for NTFS partitions. I'd just thought at the time it might come in handy one day, but I'd never actually used it. It took a while to get to the right version of linux (I've got at least three different kernels depending on what day of the week it is, atmospheric pressure, who won the grand national, etc), but when I finally got there, I realised I could mount the partition where all my pictures were stored under Linux. So far, so good.

Cautiously, I mounted that partition, and then clicked, hands trembling, on that pictures folder. Joy of joys, it let me in, and there were all the sub-directories laid out before me with all the glory of a ticker tape parade.

I then had the ardurous task of using Linux to move all of these files from one partition to the other. I wasn't quite out of the woods yet though - at one point a lot of the sub-directories showed up empty, and some of the files I'd copied over seemed to be corrupt. Strangely somehow a reboot seemed to fix this. I guess that's what they mean by experimental NTFS support. After lots of very careful and laborious checking, I'm pretty sure I've now got all the files copied across, and they're all intact.

Needless to say, I then embarked on an almost military operation to finally back up all these files onto CDs. The collection runs to 9 CDs. Admitedly, not all of them are absolutely full. Still though, even after a bit of a cleanup it amounts to over 4 GB of data, in around 14,000 files. This means I've taken, on average, roughly 8 pictures per day, every day, over the last four and a bit years. That's one every three hours.

The moral of the story? Yes, you guessed it. Make sure you've got anything that is important to you backed up, and make sure you get around to it before a disaster like this occurs. I was lucky in this instance, given that it looks like I haven't actually lost anything in the end, although I have paid in that it has consumed most of my weekend sorting it out. On the plus side, I now have a fairly comprehensive set of backups for the future, something I needed to do anyway.

Also I owe a big thanks to whichever Linux developer it was that implemented that NTFS support. Without that, short of something like Norton Utilities, I really would have been stuck. It could well be that, ironically, it only worked because it was experimental - if they'd gone through all the same checking and so on that happens under Windows, I may have been denied access from Linux as well. Three cheers for half baked software!

As for exactly what has gone wrong with my file system, I'm really not sure. I guess I'll probably end up moving off all the other folders on that partition and reformatting it. Maybe I ought to buy a new hard drive. Perhaps this is a good opportunity to just clean down my system altogether and start afresh.

If you want, I'll store a copy of all your CDs here. Offsite backup... then if something nasty happened to your CDs and you computer (stolen, fire etc) then a copy will live on. I would honestly, for the price of a few CDs, take this further and give a copy to you mum, your dad, your sister, me, Rob... etc...

Posted by tom at 2003/11/24 09:06:39.

Offsite backup and backups in general are a really good idea..... however isn't it more exciting to only have one copy of your files on a machine, knowing that you could lose the whole lot at any moment in a catastrophic event.... heart pounding moments are what make you feel 'alive' ;)

Posted by Kev at 2003/11/24 10:06:27.

Are you skiving off again today Kev....? Perhaps you can take this opportunity to backup all your files.

Posted by John at 2003/11/24 10:28:28.

Work is for saps... and don't worry, I have all my files stored on 5.25" floppy disks ... in a box next to my speakers.

Posted by Kev at 2003/11/24 10:33:15.

Yes, a similar thing happened to me a while back only with not as many files. Since then I got a DAT drive and backup stuff to tape, which is nice because one ickle tape takes around 20GB and I can deposit them all over the place....hmmm.....precious.....

Posted by Simon W at 2003/11/24 16:41:59.

John: You have motivated me into planning to back up all my files tonite.

Posted by dsp at 2003/11/25 24:18:48.

I just delete everything in realtime so don't have anything to miss.

Because I once use HDD swap caddies, I once inserted the wrong HDD and accidenatly installed Redhat over my main Windows OS once. That made me swear alot.

However, it's quite good discovering data that one forgot one had as well. I found a load of 'hard to get MP3s' on an old HDD I forgot I had once.

Not as good as finding a £10 one didn't know one had, but that doesn't happen often.

Posted by Karl at 2003/11/28 01:45:55.

...sorry about the poor standard of English on the post above, I didn't check it before I posted it.

Posted by Karl at 2003/11/28 01:48:36.

Saved all my pics to CD. Thanks John!

Posted by dsp at 2003/11/28 15:02:13.

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