For the few of you who knew that I've been working hard the past several months on a "feature length" (i.e., 9 minute) Godzilla animation, bad news; my external 120 Gb Medea Video Raid system that contained all of the past month's of rendered (entirely in Poser, edited in Adobe Premiere) animation files crashed. The data may be recoverable, but even if it is, my still-unemployed status greatly inhibits my ability to pay the $4,000 to $9,000 cost that all of the data recovery shops have quoted me. (Not that I would pay that outrageous amount even if I was gainfully employed.)

Sigh...

I was working hard to have this done in time for the re-release of the original Godzilla 1985 in theaters this fall (and had even been contacted by an individual who, based on his look at some early edits, thought he could get it distributed in a particular thearter chain as a short animation preceeding the main Godzilla feature). It used Scott A's funky Poser Godzilla model and the song "Godzilla" by Blue Oyster Cult (to whom I was going to email a preview animation copy of this week), as well as Poser models by various other talented artists.

I also was going to email all of the model contributors this week telling them of my plans and asking their permission to use their creations (and share in any resulting monetary rewards), but alas... I was just two more Poser scenes (of about 50 seconds length) away from having it completed when the Raid system crashed, taking Godzilla away to the great animation beyond.

(Sorry. Just needed a Community shoulder to cry on. No need to reply. Now, if you'll kindly excuse me, it's time to refresh my Bloody Mary glass. )

Message edited on: 08/11/2004 17:38

Ouch! Hardrive crashes suck. There are so many people complaining about them lately, it makes me wonder whats going on. I had 3 crashes this year...so I feel your pain.

Been there, but not quite to this extent. You have my sympathies.

Hey - if you know anything about computers, and have another currently functioning computer on-hand, its POSSIBLE that you can recover the data yourself. Remove the hard drive from your pc and slave it to a working pc. its a slim shot but it might work, and slaving isn't complicated. if it works you'll be able to access the hard drive and remove the files there to another drive, (or better, burn them to cd so they aren't damaged/lost again). I speak from personal experience here when a few years ago my pc was hit by lightening and i had to do the same thing. it destroyed the file system of the drive, not to mention the mother board and processor, but the files themselves were still on the hard drive - a good 90% or more). Anyway, just thought i'd suggest it. its worth a shot. what's to lose?

My sympathies :< I had a hard drive crash this year too. Do try
what Sephyn suggests. My son was able to get all the files off the
toasted drive pretty easily. $4000 to $9000??? Maybe look around a
little too if you have to get someone else to do it for you. Good
luck, sure sounds like quite a loss :

which Raid system was it? RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives) is set up so that you can lose one, or maybe 2, and still get your data back. It's commonly used in Servers. Your operating system may be able to do a recovery utility (I'm afraid my knowledge only extends to Banyan vines, which really dates me..;) Unless some idiot just named the drive 'raid'..you might bring that up.

Is this an external RAID array, or simply a 120 gig drive in an external housing? If an actual RAID...then with most of them, you are probably thoroughly screwed, particularly if data striping was used. If just a single drive, then by all means attach it to one of the IDE cables on your system, then go into the hardware resources and specify the device as a removable drive (at least if this is a windows system). Doing this will cause Windows to ignore all the bootsector info, and treat it like one big floppy disk. So long as the FAT table isn't hosed, you should be able to recover at least some files.

The medeas are striped ide drives in an external scsi box. Well, the ones we have hooked up to octanes and o2's. The rate of failure for us was 1 or 2 per 1 or 2 semesters (out of about at last count 15 drives). One I've already sent twice for repairs. Was your medea under warranty?

I would also investigate the warranty on these drives, it's possible that the manufacturer of the drive will replace them if the crash has occured within a certain timeframe in accordance with their warranty.

Thanks all. The Medea is past its warranty, but more critical to me is that, even though the unit can be repaired (only one of the four drives failed), it was a RAID 0 setup, which means data wasn't mirrored across all drives (which would have made fully data recovery likely). Now one-fourth of the data for each file is on the failed drive. These kinds of setups require special data recovery techniques that equate to about three to eight hours per drive of service time, and the hourly rates of the places that do this kind of work start at $120, hence the outrageous sum to try to recover the data. Was the animation good, yes, I humbley submit is was far better than good. But was it worth several thousand dollars to save? Not when I'm barely keeping afloat and looking for work. I suppose I could eventually get the RAID repaired and start all over. I do have about 50% of the base files saved as Pz3s. But rebuilding it as it was, besides being enormously frustrating, will take a long time (there was hundreds and hundreds of hours of rendering alone), and I don't know if my heart is in it anymore. I just wish I could find a data recovery shop that would cut me a break. They're use to having professional clients who have a budget for such things, not unemployed hobbyists on home PCs.

That's a shame Terry. I would have liked to see it. BTW: I'm sure you're aware of this. But TOHO is currently making the "Last Godzilla Film" called FINAL WARS. The buget is double the size of any G movie ever shot. Over ten of the most popular past monsters will be in this final movie with major upgrades. And even though Godzilla will still be an actor in a suit, he will be so fast that he'll actually be able to RUN! and JUMP! -ScottA

ScottA, good to hear from you! You would have been proud of your model. He definitely stole the whole show!

The stoty started with him in a bargain bin at a toy store when a boy picks him up and starts imagining him running amok through a city (that's where the Blue Oyster Cult song comes in). I had so many great shots of him being atttacked (in vain) by helicopters, jet planes, rockets and finally an atomic bomb that destroys the city but Godzill still roars on, at which point the scene morphs back into the boy holding the toy Godzilla. He decides Godzilla is too good for the bargain bin, so he sits him on a shelf that happens to have some Barney toys. After the boy leaves, Godzilla comes to life as do the Barneys. As Godzilla is scoping out the closest Barney in disbelief, Barney starts to sing that obnoxious Barney themes song, to which the disgusted Godzilla flames him into a molten mass, takes his place on the shelf and all the toys go dormant again as the scene fades to black, the end. This brief description does not do justice to the animation, it just came out so good! I was just starting to prepare the closing credits, which also were to have animated shots of Godzilla doing some funky dance steps to the closing music, but alas... This was the week I was going to post some static shots and let you and others see their models in action, but, again, alas... Maybe I'll still post some by rendeing stills from the few Pz3 files that are still intact on another hard drive, if anyone's interested in seeing them.

Message edited on: 08/12/2004 07:15

Oh yeah, of course we are! Sorry to hear about the disaster (been through 2 hd crashes myself over the years) And of course,another good time to remind everyone: Make backups of important stuff! Rule of thumb.. if you don't want to loose it, back it up! I've finally geven in to using my old 1x dvd burner for backups.. its slow, but can backup 4 gig per disc.

Yeah, I learned (or so I thought) from a previous crash, and my present system has three internal SCSI 80 GB hard drives with which I back up all my programs and data on one drive and my completed video and animation projects on the third. When I render for animations and edit in Adobe Premiere, I do it in uncompressed format so I can add special effects, etc. to the final, and I do it on the external RAID drive so things process faster. Unfortunately, I didn't have back up to the RIAD unit, although now I certainly wish I would have. I could have reconsidered storing some of finished video and animations that I've done in the past on one of the internal drives, but that didn't seem like a good idea at the time, and there was not enough space left to store a working backup of the Godzilla animation, although if I ever get over this heartbreak and try a project this complex again, I'll certainly maintain a working backup somewhere somehow.

Should've, would've could've. Live and learn.

I'll get around to posting some still shots, of course they won't have all of the nifty FX (fire, smoke, explosions, etc.) that the postworked finals had.

Maybe the best idea next time, is make a dvd or svcd image of the animation, so at least it's archived somehow, even if not in a workable format?

Yeah, great minds think alike. I actually did that - put it on a Mini DV tape out of Premiere - just last week because I wanted to take it and show my grandkids what I was working on. Guess what, I ended up taping over it after they had seen it. Now I have some cute video of my grandkids and no archived copy of the worked completed up to last week. Arrrrgh!

Raid 0?..didn't know anyone was still using it. If possible, you might switch to another type, if possible. I repaired servers for years, and they were usually set to Raid 5 (and set to scsi..I hated doing the jumpers on those drives..;). And 1 or 2 drives per semester is a suspiciously high rate of failure, you might want to look at the controller or cable, or something..

My RAID system is several years old, and back then RIAD 0 was common for video production work because of its superior read/write speed and efficiency. The trade off is no mirroring of files across all drive units, which makes data recovery problematic for a failed drive. (Boy, I'm learning all kinds of stuff that I never wanted to learn!) What I'm focusing on now is trying to find a data recovery shop experienced with RAID systems that might cut this home PC animation hobbyist a break on the thousands of dollars that they normally charge their corporate customers for darta retreival. (One shop bragged how they recovered Sean Connery's personal computer files, an entire season of Simpsons episodes for the producer, etc. Out of my price league to be sure!) Anybody have any suggestions for finding such a dream come true?