As luck has it, last night before I was going to bed, my still relatively new Mac Book Pro suggested I make an update, which I started. Hours later…it hadnt completed, I call tech support….and it appears as if I have lost just about everything, including most of the Canon 40D video….I had several hundred hours of work invested into it.
Luckily, I don’t think I have lost any photographs, I make back ups of everything to DVD as well as an external hard drive…but losing all the work in progress on the video and photography school (the only way to really back video up is to export it, while I have some but most of it is gone) was a bit of a blow.
Apple Tech support was indifferent about it…after trying an archive and reinstall, the best they could offer was “contact a third party company about file restore software- we cant help you”…. wow. It suddenly appears Mac’s as well as their support systems are not quite as bullet proof as the general perception.
A few minutes after the initial shock….I realized this can only be a good thing. I mean…look at me…Im Michael Andrew…..only good things happen to me, sometimes I just have to change how I see them initially.
1. Redoing everything definately wont take as long….Ive learned a ton of things in the process. I know what to do and how to do them.
2. There were a few things I didnt like about the video…this gives me a great chance to make them better.
3. Im going back to my PC system for the new edit…it never had a problem, the new Adobe software doesn’t seem to work on the Intel based mac books which means I wont have to deal with the constant unexpected shut downs. Im faster with that system.
4. I obviously must look at how I back up video for works in progress. I have the original tapes, It just means I have to restart the edit.
Im going to think about this for the rest of the day…..try to figure out what the situation is guiding me towards. I know everything will be ok….its good to have eye openers like this every once in a while.
Mike, I’m so sorry! However part of me has to chuckle..not at you but at the MAC nation (my husband incld) who think they are impervious to this problem. I hate that it happened to someone who had so much work on their computer but it is nice to see that MACs can fall down a few rungs on their ladder…Good luck with the new video
Mike! That’s horrible! All that work, gone. I am glad that you are taking this so well, but it still has to be quite the trial.
After 2 hours of waiting I was able to speak with a specialist at Apple. I liked this guy, he was brutally frank and honest. "Its like driving on the freeway and getting a flat…sometimes it just happens and there is nothing you can do to prevent it." He said the drive was most likely damaged electrically or magnetically and while it may install a new system there was no way to restore the old one. "But….there is a way to recover your old files…." Tomorrow night I will be using Doug Cole’s Mac to access mine as an external hard drive, download the files I need, then re-install it all. "Everything should be there" he said…..we shall see. You know…I felt pretty good about having back ups of all my pictures…..I thought "Dude…you were all over that". Ive always kept two copies of just about everything Ive taken.
Mike, I hope that you are able to hook your mac up as an external when I read the post that was my first suggestion. I know you use adobe products for editing so I don’t know their file save system, but in Final Cut Pro I always save my program files to an external drive. That saves all my progress at a fraction of the file size. Thats also why I have two Terabites of storage in the house. redundant backups.