Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web?
by Kerrick on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @09:20AM
(#30085660)
Modern technology erases it too. I am already seeing the drives that I used in college to store my raw camera files and LR catalogs degrade to the point of not being able to read the data as I try this month to move them to fresh storage. For some of my oldest photos, I only have whatever processed JPGs I happened to upload to a cloud provider that stuck around this long. The silver-based negatives from my film work at that time, though, are still fine.
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Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web?
by wholinator2 on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @10:02AM
(#30086282)
Might be a long shot, but GRCs Spinrite has saved a couple drives of mine. It won't work if there's a problem with the physical connection to the drive but almost everything else it can fix (at least momentarily) and actually grants a nice speed boost in the process for drives that have gotten too messy.
Re:Ask HN: Is the past disappearing on the web?
by dsl on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @04:55PM
(#30092524)
Aside from all the flashy handwavy marketing "technospeak" what SpinRite actually does under the hood is re-read each bit from the disk thousands of times and then see if it gets more 0s or 1s.
It works well when a drive is past the point where its internal error correction code no longer works, but you just want to beat the right answer out of it with a baseball bat.
These days professional disk recovery by a lab is sub-$1000 and they recommend not using brute force tools like Spinrite because it can also exacerbate the problem before they get hands on it.