One-Dollar Wonders

30 Comments

• catgirl replied 11 years ago

  Wait, what happened?!?!

• JulieJohn replied 11 years ago

  Yes, what happened? Maybe all hope is not lost.

• Mochi replied 11 years ago

  Oh, I'm so sorry, rae. My first thought was, Hey, at least this place will never lose data! But all the rest of it is too bad.

  We have Time Machine and my understanding is that it backs up every day (well, if you scheduled it to do so--we have). Are you sure you've lost all that much?

• texstyle replied 11 years ago

  Oh Rae, so sorry you are feeling bummed, but you know memories are the best saved part of any life and you have those! Maybe you can make "light" of this by recreating some birthday moment (or by creating some other fun momen) for DH and taking a few new photos? And you can make that turkey again - November is just around the corner :-). I wish I had a solution to get the files back - sometimes a computer service place can actually do that for you (recover the hard drive contents), but I'm not sure if you want to go to those lengths.

• rae replied 11 years ago

  I'm still not even sure. I was deleting old screenshots from desktop and pictures folder. Somehow I ended up with "iphoto library" in my trash bin, so I of course freaked out and chose "put back." Well, whatever was in the trash over-wrote my real iphoto library when the computer put it back, making all my pictures poof into thin air. And then when I gave up troubleshooting to restore, I'd already been knee deep in therapeutic amaretto sours and totally forgot to back up my excel and website files. Sigh... and now after using Time Machine I can't even launch Excel, can't even right click the desktop... bleh.

• replied 11 years ago

  Ahhhh...
  Maybe they can restore the hard drive. Take it in.
  Nothing is ever completely deleted. You need a tech person.

• Mochi replied 11 years ago

  Update--I just now went to Last Backup in my Time Machine, and it said May 20, 2012! Now, that HAS to be wrong, but still that gave me a huge jolt! I'm backing up right now. Thanks, rae.

• rae replied 11 years ago

  Thanks, ladies...

  Mochi, I did not have my external hard drive connected for some time. No recent backups.

  Texstyle, DH helped me do a file recovery, but I think because the photo library was overwritten and not actually deleted, we couldn't get it back. We do have teeeeny thumbnails from the birthday, but that's it. :T You are very right, though, that our memories will always be with us.

• Mochi replied 11 years ago

  "therapeutic amaretto sours"

  Can I keep that for potential use in a novel someday? I'll give you full credit.

  I'm sorry and it sounds so stressful....but I'm having this sense that you haven't really permanently lost it (or all of it). Now it could be kind of a PITA to get it back, but still, you may be able to!

  (whoops, I just cross-posted with you.)

• replied 11 years ago

  I bet you look fantastic, what a great tee shirt.

  So sorry about the computer mishap. {{{Rae}}}

• Suz replied 11 years ago

  Rae, I am SOOOO sorry.

  I know exactly how you feel, and I mean exactly. My hard drive unexpectedly crashed this spring, taking everything, including photos, with it. And I didn't have proper backup either because I"m awful about taking that for granted on a Mac; I've never had a serious malfunction in about 20 years of using one.

  I was terrified I'd lost my novel manuscript. And so I took it first to the tech guys at the university - they helped me get the novel but couldn't get everything else back because files were corrupted.

  So I sprung big bucks and sent it to one of those retrieval places. First of all, I can write it off against my taxes, so it really cost half what they charged me. And then they charged me a university rate, which was lower than the regular rate. So for a few hundred dollars I got ALL my files back, every single one.

  I am glad I spent the money to do it.

• Mochi replied 11 years ago

  I have to take a break from this thread. First birthday photos, and now a novel-in-progress???? I need to calm down.....sorry to everyone and may we all be better backup-ers from here on.

• Suz replied 11 years ago

  It's okay, Mochi - I got it back!! The story has a happy ending! :-)

• Mochi replied 11 years ago

  I know--but still!!!

  (I remember Toni Morrison losing a full draft of a novel in a house fire...and I remember reading about another one--can't recall her name--who kept her MS wrapped in aluminum foil in her freezer to safeguard it! Yikes.)

• Sylvie replied 11 years ago

  Take your hard drive to the Apple store. NOW. Your photos are probably still on your hard drive but you don't have the iphoto database set up to find them.

  Think of a hard drive as an excel spreadsheet.

  Let's say your iphoto library is stored starting at cell D3 and goes all the way to cell D200. So in D3, it says "photos are in D4 to D200". If you look in D4, there's a photo. Same for D5, all the way to D200.

  You had your other "iphoto library" in the trash. Let's say it was stored in cells T17-T24. T17 says "photos are in T18-T24". T18-T24 contain photos of ugly clothes.

  When you restored the iphoto library, it copied the contents of cell T17 to cell D4. So cell D4 now says "photos are in T18-T24". Your photos are *still* there in D4-D200 but they're not part of the library and iphoto doesn't know how to find them.

  Of course it's possible that the photos in T18-T24 got copied over the D4-D10 cells. But then you *still* have the photos in D11 to D200 sitting on your hard drive.

  I'm not saying iphoto works exactly like this. But this is a model of how deletion/replacement often works. You don't delete the data, you just delete the "reference" to the data.

  This is why it's possible to recover files from hard drive and why they advise wiping your drive (ie, writing it over with nonsense data) before disposing of it.

  (for any techies out there, yes, I know I'm oversimplifying)

• replied 11 years ago

  Rae, I'm not a tech person but from the sound of it, it seems the hard drive is functioning correctly, it was probably an error within the software or something you might have inadvertedly done. An apple tech person should be able to find the files without problem. The hard drive might not have crashed, at all. That's when it gets expensive.

• Suz replied 11 years ago

  Yeah - I would advise talking to a tech person first and then considering whether to go further. That is exactly what I did; my malfunction was a hard drive, obviously, so I went the full out route.

  But I have also "lost" an entire iphoto library a few times exactly as Sylvie describes, and easily got it back. It was there all along, just mislabeled.

• Transcona Shannon replied 11 years ago

  Oh Rae - how horrid and frustrating! Definitely take it to the Apple tech dudes and see what they can do. Don't give up hope completely just yet!

• rae replied 11 years ago

  Sylvie, does this still apply now that I have done a Time Machine system restore? Or have I now made it irrecoverable?

• Angie replied 11 years ago

  (((HUGS)))

  I'm sorry :(. Hopefully you will be able to retrieve more of what has been lost.

• Sylvie replied 11 years ago

  Rae, a system restore should only be overwriting the part of your hard drive where the system files are stored. Your data files will typically (but not always) end up stored in a different section of the hard drive.

  It is *really* hard to get rid of *all* data on a drive in such a way that no one can ever get it back. Let the apple geniuses take a look at it. I'm not an expert and they'll have a much better idea if your data is recoverable. If they can't fix it, then you'll need to decide if you want to try a data recovery service like Suz (which is unfortunately pricey).

• Mo replied 11 years ago

  Scary! I woke up to a blank computer this summer. It somehow rebooted and 'found' all my stuff but I bought a flash drive for the latest pics that I'd added that weren't backed up on my external drive left back in Tahoe.
  I should add this last month's photos to it, now that I'm thinking about it . . .
  You don't know what you got 'til it's gone . . .

• replied 11 years ago

  Rae, I don't think is lost, it is scattered. Think of a puzzle that once was put together, then someone kicks it out of place, into a million pieces. please let us know how it goes! As Silvie says, it is really hard to delete data permanently.

• Inge replied 11 years ago

  It's always scary when this happens, Rae, but I agree with the other ladies, do let the Apple people have a look, there really is a good chance that all files can be retrieved.

• rae replied 11 years ago

  ARG, I keep trying to call Apple stores to ask how much they charge for this stuff and I keep getting hung up on when it is my turn!

  I have an all-in-one unit, so it is a huge deal to lug my whole computer down there without even knowing how much money it will cost to have them look at it - let alone fix it.

• Mander replied 11 years ago

  I've never really used a Mac, so I'm not sure how it works, but you might be able to get more back. The important thing is not to keep writing new files to the hard drive -- you will eventually write over the thing you are trying to recover.

  I saw this link in a super quick search that might be useful:
  http://www.wondershare.com/dis.....h-mac.html

  If you want to try getting your hands a little dirtier and try using a Linux Live CD to see what you can recover, have a look at this article:
  http://www.howtogeek.com/howto.....u-live-cd/

  Some other things I saw that might be useful:
  http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-photo-recovery.htm

  http://alternativeto.net/softw.....atform=mac

• catgirl replied 11 years ago

  Rae, there really should be a way to get it back.

  Not to get off on a tangent, but this is often how people get busted for IT-related crimes - they think they've erased images or files that are really still there and get found by some innocent computer repair person.

• Diana replied 11 years ago

  Oh, no! I hope they are able to recover your photos and files. Agree with everyone else to let the Apple geniuses take a crack at it. If it's just a software issue they don't usually charge anything even if it's off warranty. It should definitely be free for them to take a look at it and tell you what is wrong at the very least.

  By the way, I just backed up my work computer after reading this thread. I think my home computer (with all my photos) is due for another time machine backup too, so I will do that when I go home. Like you, my time machine does not continually back up (I have laptops exclusively so it makes no sense to keep the external hard drive attached at all times). Thank you for the reminder.

• ElleH replied 11 years ago

  Rae was it the icloud upgrade due yesterday?

• rae replied 11 years ago

  Well, I just got finished with the Apple Geniuses - I was actually able to avoid hauling my whole setup to a store by having a specialist remotely access my computer.

  The bad news is that when I'd restored the backup I erased everything that they might have been able to save. So my pictures and files are totally gone.

  The good news is that it wasn't completely my fault for being ignorant and stuff because my original backup was corrupted somehow and so all the subsequent backups were messed up, too.

  The other good news is that they were able to fix my desktop issues at the same time, with no extra charge. And again, I did not have to leave my home, and I can have followup support for 30 days. All for $19.

  So... the thing I've learned today is that next time I ought to call Apple Support immediately instead of troubleshooting with DH, since I know nothing and DH only knows PCs well. It sounds like they could have fixed everything if only I had not done a Time Machine Restore. I also know that it doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

  Thanks, everyone, for encouraging me to do this. No more what-ifs, and I can use my desktop again. :)