Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1076412
by James Delhauer 26 themselves holding a faulty memory card or storage drive? The first and most important step is to stop using the faulty unit immediately. Attempted use could exacerbate problems and make data recovery more difficult. When not attempting troubleshooting, the device should remain powered off and unplugged. The next step is to attempt to deduce the sort of problem that has caused a drive to fail. Broadly speaking, issues can be divided into the categories of logical failure, mechanical failure, and complex failure. Each of these groups presents its own symptoms and has its own set of troubleshooting steps. So correctly assessing the type of problem is essential. Logical failure is the most prevalent and is the result of digital damage to the device's partition—the file system that a computer uses in order to communicate with a storage medium. When a drive ceases to function as a result of logical failure, it remains physically sound and viable but cannot be read or written to by the computer's operating system. More often than not, this means that all of the files that a user has on the device are safe and sound but simply cannot be accessed until the partition is repaired. Reasons RECOVERING a Failed Storage Unit D igital storage devices are bigger and faster than ever before but the risk of failure and data loss is just as daunting as it was when the first hard disk drive was invented in 1954. Today, digital storage mediums exist along every link in the chain of the film and television business. Petabytes of information are created, acquired, distributed, and archived every year. We rely on digital storage almost as much as we rely on craft services but there is a very real danger of drive failure, data corruption, and loss of work. An estimated 0.3 percent of flash storage devices sold each year will suffer some sort of fault or accidental damage resulting in data loss. For mechanical devices that still utilize moving parts, that number increases to approximately 1.7 percent. While these numbers may sound comfortingly low, the sheer number of storage devices used within the industry would suggest that drive failure comes up more often than one might think. While it is always advised that media be backed up to multiple storage units as soon as possible, mistakes can happen or failure can occur before that is possible. So, what should a Local 695 sound mixer or video engineer do if they find In 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall upon the Southeastern Seaboard of the United States, cutting a swath of devastation in its path and inflicting incalculable damage to those who were left in its wake. Though we continue to mourn the loss of life and livelihood that this natural disaster caused, the residents of New Orleans and other affected territories have spent more than a decade rebuilding. In that time, hundreds of personal hard drives have been sent to data recovery centers across the nation in the faint hope that the data contained within could be salvaged. Devices that were battered by the storm and then submerged in murky waters for days, weeks, or even months would be deemed a lost cause to almost anybody. But they weren't. In what can only be described as the miracle of technology, survivors began to see their personal data recovered and returned to them intact. This proved quite definitively that digital data is more robust than most would have suspected.