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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Backing up R3D files from corrupted firewire drive

A

Andrew Lawless

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Hi My name is Andy, and I'm having an issue with 2 days worth of shooting from a recent shoot. Each day of shooting was backed up onto a Lacie Rugged 500 gigabyte Firewire drive and was to be duplicated from there. However, the drive has gotten sticky and continues to fail to transfer the Magazines from each day of shooting, roughly 100 gigabytes per day. I've had success with a couple of the magazines from this drive, but not all. It's transferring data at an incredibly slow rate. Approximately 5 gigabytes per hour at best, and fails after about 7 hours of data transfer, leaving the duplicate magazine incomplete. I'm currently trying to duplicate smaller chunks of data, the actual clip folders from within the magazine, in hopes that I can rebuild the magazine on a drive that's working properly. If anyone has any advice as to how I might be able to make this process successful, or any other method on how I might retrieve data from this problem hard drive, it would be greatly appreciated.

Best;

Andy
 
You could try REDUNDEAD, found over at RED.com/support.

I know it's late for this but where's your duplicate backup drive? Most "dump" RED media to 2-3 drives to CTA. It's SOP in digital filmmaking - You have to backup to more than 1 drive... And don't drag/drop either...
 
Thanks for the feedback, Shawn. Making a back up is exactly what I'm trying to do. And drag/drop aint happenin'. Would you recommend creating a disc image, or is there another approach that you might suggest?
 
You can use R3D Data Manager for all of the above:

- R3D Data Manager will copy your footage to up to 4 destinations at once, and ensure that each copy is a exact duplicate.

- R3D Data Manager also has a R3D Recovery tool, that uses REDundead and picks up where REDundead leaves off. It also is GUI based, so you dont have to figure out drive letters and command line scripting.
 
Not to make an example of Andrew here as I'm sure he's doing what time and budget allowed, but it is a great example of what some people are doing in the field and the great risks that go along with it. If his method had worked flawlessly, then that would continue to be the workflow because it worked. But it's that one time it doesn't that kicks your butt.

If you are going to use drag and drop, it's imperative that you go to at least two drives and those two drives leave the set with two different people so if the car blows up you lose one drive not both.

Also, with this method you have to watch every frame. Too risky not to. If the best take of the day turns out to suddenly not want to play from the backup drive even though it was fine on camera, you need to know about it so you can let the producers know.

I can't stress enough how important it is for producers, indie filmmakers, etc to understand the importance of multiple backups. If you're not going to allow for a true verification system like MD5 Checksum, then at the very least allow the data tech to have two drives to drag and drop to. And always drag and drop from the source.

Andrew, I would suggest this to try out. Use something like Disk Warrior and see if that gets your drive back to being happy. There's a bunch of other diagnostics you can do but I'd start there.

In the future, please take my advice and get yourself your own portable drive that you can backup to even if the production doesn't provide you a second drive. That way you can be a hero and save the day (and perhaps make some additional money).
 
Thanks for the advice, Steve. Unfortunately it wasn't lack of drives to back up to, it was lack of time to back up to a second drive before releasing the Red Drive for more shooting. I'm using a trial version of R3D Data Manager now to retrieve files from the corrupted drive. So far so good, but it's early on in the process. Wish I'd had it in the field. Disk Warrior is also on the list of options for recovery. Thanks for mentioning that. One thing I've noticed with my corrupted drive, is that the problem is with copying the data. I can still access and preview all the clips on this drive in Red Alert. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but I remain optimistic.
 
Your drive is failing badly. Stop mess with it NOW and send it to data recovery company. If you can re-shoot, take that option also under consideration because data recovery is expensive. This guys do it: http://www.ibas.com/
 
This may sound silly, but how much space is there on the drive you are transferring to? Your symptoms make it sound like you're trying to add data to a full drive or RAID.

You aren't by chance copying this to a Drobo are you? I Beta tested those and experienced the same issue, hours and hours to transfer a tiny amount of data. The problem? There wasn't enough free space on the Drobo. The solution? Make more space available.

Good luck,
Charlie
 
Plenty of space to write to on which ever drive or Raid I select. Wish it were that simple.
 
Cail Young said:
Buy more media. Sorry to be so blunt, but you wouldn't go out on a P2 shoot with one 8GB card, would you?
Click to expand...

This is of course the correct way to do it. If shooting to Red Drive, one in the morning, switch to a second drive at lunch backup the first, then depending on how much was shot in the afternoon possibly switching out again an hour or two before wrap to backup the second drive. Then just a small amount to backup at the end of day. Go home and have a beer.

I am not a big fan of going into the field with one RED drive. If for no other reason you are putting all your eggs in one basket. If that drive goes down you could really be out of luck for the day. Three drives is the ideal. But budget doesn't always allow that. Always fight to get the 2 drives.
 
Andrew Lawless said:
I can still access and preview all the clips on this drive in Red Alert. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but I remain optimistic.
Click to expand...

It might not be of a great help, or you might have tried also, but once, I was really freaking out, because I was able to see the media perfectly on the 16 GB card, but when copying it to the back up hardrive it had problems (R3d manager would say there were errors) and in some clips I would get broken frames) After a long suffering day, I changed the firewire cable and everything was perfect again. I threw away that cable and from now on, I always go with extra firewire cables.

Ivan C.
 
Thanks for all the feedback. I've currently got 95% of the R3D files off the corrupted drive, and discovered that at least 1 of the 8 files I'm unable to transfer to another drive, I'm able to open with Red Alert and transcode to Apple Pro Res. So all is not lost, yet. I'm wondering, though, what's the best method for reconstructing the salvaged R3D files that I've successfully copied to new drives. All of the rescued .RDC folders are inside the .RDM folder they originally lived in, but neither the digital.magazine.profile or the digital.magdynamic.profile have been copied. Are these necessary?
 
Andrew Lawless said:
All of the rescued .RDC folders are inside the .RDM folder they originally lived in, but neither the digital.magazine.profile or the digital.magdynamic.profile have been copied. Are these necessary?
Click to expand...

No, you won't need them unless you're OCD. They're used by the camera to track what the media should be doing but aren't hugely helpful in post.
 
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