Digital My Ass

[S8 Booster]

within months - possibly 6 - the following died on me about simoultanesly:

1xSony PC120 MiniDV Cam
1xLaCie 500 GB AV external AV disk
1xLaCie 500 GB external backup disk
1xLaCie 500 GB external backup disk

big surprise when the Sony could not read the MiniDV tapes anymore and the hugh pretty new big battery took no charge no more.
after running a Sony cleaning tape i made it read the tapes but the battery or charge was lost. run on charger only,

all the LaCie disks are dead. they spit n chew but wont be fixn it... ie try to initiate the head but leaves it #ticking# - all do the same...
they wont show up for any tool to reach them and mend them. There is no tool on the net which fixes this, has run firmware updates bla bla bla ... for no use.

so lots of edited - edit material is lost. i still have the raw tapes so i can recapture most of it.

for some reason the old Sony Hi8 seem to have survived. as of yet i can use the MiniDV cam as a digitizer and transfer Hi8 and MiniDV (containing transferred S8 digitized films) tapes into digital diskery but i seem to have to be more selective in which disk material i use for the future.

regular machinery; Mac Mini/Powerbook, also tried Lenovo laptop/XP for recovery but no use.

film is safe....st...

shoot,,,,

[carllooper]

film is safe....st...

Yes, digital data has that ability to just vanish into thin air.

Film has it's problems of course but not that particular problem. Although one day, about twenty years ago, I went to get some archive film reels out of a cupboard, that had been there for a year. I opened the door and the cupboard was empty. I'd been away for a year. It turned out a new young and upcoming studio manager had, over the holiday period, decided the studio needed a complete clean (and that included everything in the cupboard). So everything had gone to the rubbish tip two weeks earlier. Well, almost everything.

Ironically someone in the building on the day, noticed some video tapes in the rubbish skip and had rescued them (and to drop a name, he was Mia Wasikowska's dad) and he said "Carl I thought you might have wanted these".

I asked myself why? Of everything in the cupboard why were only the videotapes rescued? Well the tapes had big stickers on them saying "DO NOT ERASE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES" with my name on them. Tapes are reusable, so I had wanted these tapes to remain as is (they were expensive transfers of the film reels). The film reels, however, had no such stickers. And in the eyes of the young, they were just some old dusty relic to be thrown out.

I should have put the same stickers on the damned film reels:

DO NOT ERASE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES

C

[aj]

If the battery is new then it is likely from China. Direct buy batteries from China too often are not what they promise. NiMH proves to be NiCd and so on. The amount of chemistry inside too often is far less then needed to supply the promissed mAh.

The same goes for flash memories. They register nicely with 4Gb or something but when hitting using 1Gb it proves there is only 1Gb inside.

Run the camera using a net-supply.

In an attempt to access the disks I would unmount then from their portable housings and connect them directly to a computer's SATA connections. Check the BIOS to see if they register there. And then access them using the OS on the system or boot it from a DVD with a LINUX Penicilin (Knopix Knopiciline) and diagnose from there.

[super8man]

And to think those LaCie drives all had that wonderful "Porsche" styling. LOL

Sucks about the loss of those platters S8Booster. I know have a bunch of similar WD drives and they remain unpowered most of their life. I wonder what will happen when they decide not to work anymore...

My only solution is to keep copying their contents in their entirety to each new external drive that comes along. Typically one can copy 4 old drives to a single new drive. Never throw out the old ones.

Youtube is somewhat useful for archival with lots of caveats. But it seems to work. Until one day youtube shuts down like the good ol' Yahoo Geocities accounts did. "Surprise!" LOL

You pretty much got to keep on evolving and changing formats with the ultimate sad knowledge that one day someone will simply toss your memories into the dumpster as Carl has mentioned.

Keep on truckin'

[S8 Booster]

thanks for the good advices and inputs all. i was on the road (or had in my mind) to "reform" all data onto new/er HDs but was taken by surprise by the fact that all 3 disks failed about the same time - and the MiniDV cam on top of that. at least 2 disks contained the same material as a backup.

as for the battery - it is an original Sony LI-ION:"FABRIQOUE AU JAPON" 7.2v, 19.9 Wh. (big).
it may be the cam charger system. ill try to find the original smaller battery to see if it appears the same.

luckily the original recording tapes are still readable many containing S8 transfers.

shoooott....

[jpolzfuss]

...by the fact that all 3 disks failed about the same time

Really try to use the hard disks in another external housing or attempt to connect them directly to your computer (as already proposed by aj): Last month a friend's external drive "failed". However only the housing's electronics failed! The hard disk was working fine in another housing (and is still working fine so far).

"FABRIQOUE AU JAPON"

When it's really "FABRIQOUE" (with an O between Q and U), then it's not an original Sony-battery, but a cheap fake. :mrgreen:

[S8 Booster]

Only French words i am quite familiar with is> Cognac, Bordeaux and Renault or there about



ok, thanks, ill find some way to take out the internal disks and put them into a different suitable disk cabinet with the right interface.
these seem to have USB interface in the computer end:
http://www.cableworld.no/pc-tilbehoer/h ... cAod7lkANw


shoot....

[S8 Booster]

as for the LaCies - there are 3 different internal disks for the 4 units:

LaCie - Seagate Barracuda 500G Ultra ATA
LaCie - Maxtor 250GB ATA
Lacie - Maxtor 120 GB ATA
Lacie - 2 x WD 160 GB Enhanced IDE
from this it is most likely that the problem sticks to the LaCie "Compound" which incorporates the power and interface modules.
ie that to install the disks into "new" cabinets may solve the issue.

searching the net on the issues shows a black hole silence from LaCie apart form updating the frimware which I have done - without any improvement.

shoot...

[Will2]

I've learned that lesson hard; always have backups of backups. I have an archive drive that everything goes to and that gets backed up every day along with periodic backups stored on a shelf every three months or so. I've gone through every old drive including Zip and JAZZ disks and copied everything over to the archive. I'm a data whore I know but just seems crazy to lose any work.

I've had two LaCie drives go bad (the only two I ever had) and only one other one out of 30 or so I've had over the years.

I picked up a DVCAM deck off eBay for a few hundred dollars and use that for miniDV and DVCAM tapes. I really need to capture all of those and archive to drive as well...since they are SD that take relatively little room on a drive.

You're totally right about film. Just store it decently and you're ok for many years. Any Kodachrome will look great for 100 years even if its not stored perfectly. And you're future-proofed; especially if you've shot any 35mm...you're 4k and 8k ready! (except your lenses probably didn't resolve to 8k; but then nobody's really do).