How I Saved a Crashed eSATA External Hard Drive…with Ubutnu
A pretty un-brand loyal Windows user, I have used a version of Microsoft Windows since roughly 1995 – at the age of 13 years old. But only because I had to. Before our family had an IBM PC, we did have an Apple Macintosh, the one with a green screen. But that was before the days of operating systems. The first OS I ever became really familiar with was Windows (Windows 95 to be exact). Even as a teenager before I ever had an interest in graphic design I used to find images on the computer (from my Encyclopedia CD-ROM) and retouch them in MS Paint, drawing the head of a storm trooper, a clown, a dog and whatever else I could think of over faces in a crowd from a picture taken decades ago.
Fast forward to 2004, when I graduated college and got my first freelance design gig – still using Windows (Windows XP on an eMachines desktop my parents gave me as a graduation gift). Three years later in 2007, when I started JAG Design Ideas and got into freelance design full time – yup, you guessed – Windows Vista. At that time I purchased a new Gateway desktop computer packed with a 1.6 GHz Core2Duo processor, and 4 GB of RAM, and a 24″ HD monitor.
And that’s when it started – the problems, that is. Before Vista I was using XP, which was a solid OS, and before that I didn’t do really anything serious enough on a computer to experience many issues. But once I started using that Vista based PC seriously, all it took was a matter of about 6 or 7 weeks before I began to get issues where the machine would freeze, or crash. Eventually after a year or so and one OS reinstall later, I decided to really beef up the thing with a total of 8GB of RAM, a second internal hard drive (for Photoshop’s scratch disks to run on without competing with windows for scratch space), and an upgrade version of Vista Ultimate, to run in a 64 bit environment. The upgrades were awesome. I knew I’d have to get a new PC eventually, but I really believed by spending those several hundred dollars I had just extended the life of my machine by a year or two at the least. Well, fast forward another year and or so, and after another OS reinstall, dozens of support instances and dozens of hours on the phone with a Microsoft tech support rep later, I knew it was time for a new computer.
At first I only considered buying another PC. Why? The same reason I had never switched to a Mac: the cost. The cost of a Mac (whether perceived or real) is what kept me from buying a machine with a far majority of people in my industry use for creative work in the first place. I just didn’t see how I could afford what I could get on a PC for thousands less (at least in terms of hardware specs). But then, after plenty of researching the real cost of what I actually needed, I began to reconsider. I also found an extra resource for making my purchase, so buying a Mac became a viable option.
Eventually I landed on a great deal on a Mac Pro I found on eBay. I never would have considered eBay, only my cousin Ryan, a California based Flash designer encouraged me to check it out since he’d had great success buying iMacs on ebay for both himself and his wife.
The deal was a steal. A creative agency called DigitalKitchen had purchased 20 of these Macs to render video for one project (video for Microsoft superstores – how ironic?) and didn’t need them all at the end. I bought one with an 8 core 2.26GHz Nahalem and 16GB of RAM for a real bargain to say the least.
So, on to the point and how Linux saved my sanity the other day.
When I beefed up my old machine a year and a half ago, I also added an eSATA external hard drive to keep all of my client and personal files externally. I actually purchased two of the same units, and had originally intended to use one for the storage, and the other to back it up with, but stupidity and a massive brain fart left me having never set that scenario up. Only the one disk for storage.
After I got my new Mac and set it up, I was in the process of transferring some of my files from the external drive – font files to be exact. Thirteen hundred of them. Since I’m not so familiar with the Mac, I quickly Googled where to install fonts, and found this article on About.com which erroneously said to just drop them into the System Folder. To make a long story longer, the system ended up freezing when I attempted to delete those files from the System folder, and after hours of being unresponsive I powered down the machine with a hard shut down. And that’s when it happened – my external drive crashed.
Apparently since I’d failed to dismount the drive before shutting down the machine (and the drive) something became corrupted in the external drive. From what I learned, it was probably a Master Table File that tells the computer what type of hard drive it is, and where all the files are. The Mac asked me to Initialize it when I plugged it in, and the PC told me it had to be formatted before use. The problem – ALL of my important files were on that drive, and they were not backed up anywhere else. And formatting or initializing the drive would have meant erasing all the data before I could use it again. Not a good solution.
I went into panic mode (which for me means spending tons of time doing research, lurking in forums, and trying to find every viable option). I found that there are plenty of companies, like this one, that are happy to recover your lost data for a small fee, usually starting around $700 or $800 dollars. That one quoted me at $700 – $2800 (for the record that is the broadest quote I think I’ve ever gotten on anything). There are also software programs that are supposed to help you recover data – I tried two. Recover My Files, a PC based option, was not what I hoped. I paid $80 for it and although it was able to access my data on a PC, a) it doesn’t work with Mac, and b) the results it gives you are a nightmare of having to comb through four or five versions of every file to find what is appropriate for you. My 124GB of lost data turned into 2.4TB that I would have had to comb through with Recover My Files. I also tried something called StellarPhoenix, which costs $99, and after running the demo version I just didn’t feel like dropping another $100 for software that wouldn’t be much of a help. (*For the record Recover My Files was kind enough to refund my money upon request).
Enter the solution. In all my research I read (I think from a guy on stackoverflow.com) that Linux is sometimes able to mount damaged hard drives. If you’re not familiar with Linux, think free but surprisingly amazing version of Windows – actually IMO many times better than Windows. So I downloaded Ubuntu, which is one type of Linux based operating system. And surprisingly Ubutnu was able to read my external drive without a hitch. I just plugged the thing in, and it opened it as though it was not even corrupted! From there, I copied all my files onto the desktop of my old Windows based PC (the one now running Ubuntu), and then reformatted the external drive to transfer all those files to my Mac.
I learned a number of things from this whole incident. For one, back up your data properly – or else! Seriously, I’m going to get started with multiple backup solutions (maybe overkill, but hey) asap. I’m now keeping my data internally on a third hard drive, backing up to my eSATA drive, and I’m also going to do regular off site backups through somebody like Carbonite. I also learned to never underestimate the power of faith and prayer. Had I given up my search for an answer, and hope that the Lord would provide one earlier, this whole ordeal might have cost me quite a bit of money.
But one other thing I learned is that Ubuntu is really quite amazing. And here’s an interesting article on why 2010 may be the year of Ubuntu. Maybe more on that to come. Have you ever used Ubutnu? Has it saved your but in any scenarios? Have you ever had a really crappy experience with losing data? How did you get it back? What systems did you put in place after that? I’d love to hear.
