Formatted over drive. Help.

[Ryan Brown]

UPDATE with more info: I talked to the data recovery company. They tried 3 programs: Data rescue 3, redundead and photrec. RESCUE 3 WAS ABLE TO PULL THE SUCCESSFUL 80%, the other two programs did not work or would not run.

I realize this has been asked before, and I've done my research to no avail.

My DIT accidentally formatted one of our hard drives with our footage on it while he was backing up to our second drive. The drive was immediately unplugged and taken to a disk recovery center where they were able to get about 80% of the footage. They did two scans, the first one was able to retrieve 100% of the drive, all folders and paths in place, but not a single R3D file would play. I assume that this is because their system did not know how to properly rebuild the r3d files, but I'm not sure. Is there any way to rebuild the files? ALL of the data is here, just not playable.

They did a second scan with a different program and recovered about 80% of the footage. The files are all in one folder, and all the clips are just titled: r3d_file_00001.R3D etc. There's 46 files there. When I open any one of them, it takes about 5 minutes, but redcine eventually reads them and they play back as ONE LONG CLIP. That's fine, but I'm still missing a critical shot. I have no idea how they pulled these files back and made them usable, but they're done and not much help with the rest of the files.

I got the drive back today and am trying to run REDundead. I've followed all instructions, have tried with the "sudo" command and without, was prompted for a password, but REDundead immediately goes to "Done!" and does nothing.

Any advice out there? Why can't I get redundead to run? I spoke with RED and they charge $100 per hour for recovered footage, which is not an option.

Luckily we had most of our footage already backed up, and with what the data recovery company were able to pull back, I now have about 90% of the footage, but like I said, there's a critical shot that I REALLY want back.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Fire the DIT while you still can. And always, always get insurance on your production to prepare for days like these. It's a good idea to plan around the idea that "if something bad can happen, it will​ happen."

I would bet you that sending the drive to Red will still be cheaper than reshooting. The first thing all drive recovery companies have told to me is, "don't run any drive recovery software yet! Send it to us first." But that's my experience. I have been able to save some edit projects with Prosoft Data Rescue, but in those cases, it's only been a crash -- not a reformat.

 

[Ryan Brown]

Thanks. They ran data rescue and were able to get a lot of the footage off. I'm currently running photo rec, and in the past hour it's successfully pulled about ten clips. I'm crossing my fingers it continues to work and finds the footage I'm looking for. As far as I've researched, data recovery programs don't do any damage or any writing to the drives, so I don't think it's hurting to try my hand at it. I've had success in the past with other types of data recovery, just after weeks of tweaking my procedures and trial and error.

Never did get redundead to run, but I'm thinking that maybe it's because I'm trying from an external hard drive and not a redmag or reddrive.

Any advice is welcome, and I'll update this thread with my results and processes as they come

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Curious how this happened. Seems like a strange event the way it's described. Did the DIT attempt to format a Redmag in disk utility and initialize a hard drive instead? Was that drive in the middle of copying to second drive? Seems odd to me.

Hopefully you are able to recover everything.

 

[Ryan Brown]

PhotoRec seems to be working.! It's only been a few hours, but it's pulling the clips and I've already found the critical shot I was hoping for... and the same shot that the data recovery company couldn't get.

My process was as easy as following the instructions, but it didn't work when I was checking for "All" file types. (which it's set to by default). I had to manually go in and set it to only look for R3D's. Or maybe I just didn't wait long enough to know, but it said over 1000 estimated hours to complete. Once I set it to only look for R3D files, it started working after 20 minutes. It's now pulled over 50 gigs, including many shots that the data recovery company couldn't get, and RED was going to charge me $100 an hour.

Steve, long story short. Because of time constraints and another hard drive issue he was backed up with cards. He made the fatal error of only offloading to one drive, with intentions of copying over to our backup drive after the fact. As he was offloading one card onto the main drive, he opened the backup drive and went to format it... formatted the wrong disk. Luckily we had another drive going with reels 1-3 on it (the drive that was giving us issue's so we sent someone to buy another), and I had 3 full cards on me that had not been formatted. We lost 2.5 of 9 reels. It seems to be coming back just fine now, though.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Valuable lessons learned. I think the wise move is to always keep drives for a minimum of 24-48 hours after the shoot, and don't reformat anything until the copied footage has been checked, backed-up, and verified. Sure, more mags and more drives are expensive, but it's not nearly as costly or stressful as reshooting.

On the other hand: nobody ever had backups on film shoots, so there is that.

I know of a case on a fairly big-budgeted TV show where the key shot of the entire production was on a drive that crashed, and we barely were able to save the corrupted file. But all the important material was perfect, everything was fine in the end, and the shot wound up in the finished show... I think due to a combination of luck, persistence, and a little skill. (Mostly luck.)