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ATTN: REDUndead Experts - R3D Data Recovery Emergency

Jordan Livingston

Jordan Livingston

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ATTN: REDUndead experts,

I was called in yesterday to help out with an emergency data recovery situation. An indie documentary somehow re-formatted a 6TB drive containing x3 full shoot days of non-backed up RED footage.

I've been running REDUndead for nearly 24 hours now. So far it's recovered >1TB of R3Ds with no sign of stopping. The problem is, the RED folder structure is completely gone. I'm only getting R3Ds back; no folders, no RMDs, etc. Shots that are spanned across multiple R3Ds are coming in randomly; there's seemingly no logical order to it...

Many of the individual R3Ds are over 4GBs (some are 9, 10, 20 GBs) and those won't play at all, causing REDCine-X and REDPlayer to immediately become non-responsive. Others are very small - only a few MBs in size - and those files typically 'play' but only a few frames, with lots of visual corruption in the image.

My main question is: is there any way to restore these seemingly 'broken' R3Ds once they've been recovered by REDUndead? Next, is there any way to put the RED folder structure back together (other than manually)?

If anybody has any experience with these issues, please let me know... Thanks!

Best,

- Jordan
 
I'd contact Red directly for help with this!
 
A lot of what you are asking has to do with how the files were written to the volume.

Redundead really works best on redmags. What you are attempting is volume recovery and it might be better to use something like Datarescue 4 to recover a entire volume. Redundead was really meant for recoveringorginal media fram redmags whichmightbewhy you are seeing a discrepancy with the recovery. If the volume is damaged Redundead might. Not be able to recover the file structure. It sounds like this is the problems you are facing.

I'd consider a full volume recovery option as the file structure might before "intact"thanthemethod you are using.

David
 
Assumption : This is a single 6TB hard drive.

+) Was it a Mac or a PC?
+) What type of Format was it - a Quick format?

Quick formatting : Often moves or deletes the 'Table of Contents' of files.
You want a super fast 'discover-files-and-recreate' program (as David was intimating).

You MAY also want a 2nd 6TB Drive. (ie perform a bit level copy of the disc as it before repair)
Reason : Some program are better than others, and prefer operating on the data just after accidental format.

AJ

Edit : Comparative review of PC un-formatters with different file types (including AV).
http://www.toptenreviews.com/software/backup-recovery/best-data-recovery-software/

Top one listed : Data Rescue PC3
 
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Even with Data Rescue (which has saved my sorry ass on multiple occasions), when it recovers files, sometimes the folder structure and files are splattered all over the files. Basically, they get you the files back, but they're in a fairly random order. In the case of a rigid structure with R3Ds and RMDs and all that, it will require some work once the drive contents are recovered.

My advice: force the guy who re-formatted the drive to do all the work. It's a good lesson to learn. And buy lots more drives so this won't happen again.
 
Antony -

Yes, this was a single 6TB drive. Unfortunately, I wasn't involved with this project until after this situation occurred, but it looks like the drive was originally formatted to ExFat and then somebody re-formatted it to HFS+. Also, somebody attempted data recovery before me using a tool called "Wondershare" and was unsuccessful. Only then did the drive eventually come into my hands.

REDUndead was performed on the drive and retrieved approximately 4.8 TB of R3D files (no folder structure). Of the 4.8 TB recovered, approximately 40% of the files are perfectly useable. The other 60% are larger than 4GBs each, and won't play in either REDPlayer, REDCine-X, or Resolve.

I'm now attempting Filerecovery Pro 2016 using deep scan. It has about 4 hours remaining in its scan, and I'll report back if results are any different...

- Jordan
 
Hi Marc,

I wasn't involved with the project until after this disaster struck, and I have no certain knowledge of who the culprit was... In any case, I suspect the producers will not want this person ever touching their data again. Having said that, accidents can happen to anyone, which is why we back stuff up! I really can't understand how so much irreplaceable data was not backed up on the set, but again, I was not a part of this project until it was unfortunately too late.
 
Back on point though: once I now have the [corrupted] R3Ds, is there any tool or method (perhaps RED has one privately in house?) that can repair and salvage damaged R3Ds?!
 
Jordan,

In a previous life, one of my colleges realised that the firms biggest RAID - with 6 years worth of team development was being backed up ... to the Same disc in a different partition. He advised his sysadmin to as a matter of emergency, down the service and backup the disks to a new location.

Later that day - he got a call. The sysadmin had went into the basement, picked up the critical server RAID,
and was carrying to the flow where there was a fresh RAID, but tripped up dropping the critical RAID on the ground.

I'll spare you details of the melt down, and failed software recovery programs. What ultimately saved the day (in this case) was contacting Sysinternals (the uber tech guys who used work for Microsoft but ended up creating their own specialist company to fix Windows problems from almost any position).

That was 2004. It may that the SysInternals software is no longer 'start of the art'. It was also pricey (circa $3000). It did however save his bacon.

Best of Luck.

AJ
 
Any chance the original RED mags are still available and have not been zeroed out or low level formatted?
 
Hopefully you're well beyond this by now, but wondering...

1. Have you had any additional luck at recovery?

2. Would you be willing to upload any of the "unreadable" R3Ds for analysis? I've been working on a tool for use in situations like this, where RED Undead hasn't fully worked, and where fragmentation and other file system woes have caused R3Ds to be "found" but assembled improperly. More real-world scenarios to hack at would be helpful!
 
Daniel Keywan Hollister said:
Hopefully you're well beyond this by now, but wondering...

1. Have you had any additional luck at recovery?

2. Would you be willing to upload any of the "unreadable" R3Ds for analysis? I've been working on a tool for use in situations like this, where RED Undead hasn't fully worked, and where fragmentation and other file system woes have caused R3Ds to be "found" but assembled improperly. More real-world scenarios to hack at would be helpful!
Click to expand...

Hi Daniel

I have plenty of those if you need one. I had to reinstall windows and i lost the raid 0 structure. I could recover the files with Easeus software but they wont play. In redcinex says : failed to open (numerical argument out of domain) , whatever that means. If some one knows how to doctor this it would be greatly appreciated or if one had success with any recovery software which built the red codec structure back to a readable form, Please let me know. I am testing some other softwares too at the same time.
 
Daniel,

I have one important one of those as well if you want to have a look.

David



Daniel Keywan Hollister said:
Hopefully you're well beyond this by now, but wondering...

1. Have you had any additional luck at recovery?

2. Would you be willing to upload any of the "unreadable" R3Ds for analysis? I've been working on a tool for use in situations like this, where RED Undead hasn't fully worked, and where fragmentation and other file system woes have caused R3Ds to be "found" but assembled improperly. More real-world scenarios to hack at would be helpful!
Click to expand...
 
URGENT: RED Undead

URGENT: RED Undead

ATTN: Red Undead users

I have a G-tech 12Tb Raid drive Running on a Mac OS 10.13.1 system

My drive failed over the weekend and now Im left recovering everything on it, I had most of the R3D footage backed up expect one card, Ive run Disk Drill and it has found .r3d files but they are all numbered incorrectly now. example "file000000.r3d" and counting. I've recovered them, but none of them show up in RED Cine X and I can only get one to play in R3D Player.

So Ive installed RED Undead and run the the terminal command but I get the following warning: FAT32 recovery failed. Attempting old REDundead recovery method. This will only work if just R3D (no ProRes / DNX) was recorded!

Is this what's supposed to happen?

How do I know if the RED Undead process is working? should I see some sort of progress bar?
 
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