Hard Drive Failure(s)

This is getting to be a comedy of errors...

We have been videotaping throughout our recording process so far. At any given point, we've had 2 or 3 cameras running in different places. I posted a video from the studio already, it's up on www.talkingtowalls.com. We're working with this guy RJ Van Deusen who i met at a show at my old high school i was helping out, it's been great. I even went out and bought a semi-decent hard drive camcorder to start really getting into taking video.

Between the two of us, we just lost 60 GB of video files in the last week. Long story short, I was in the process of clearing off my laptop and putting the files i had onto a firewire drive, which would then be backed up on my actual backup drive. In the few days it was taking me to gather all the files that would go on this drive, it just blinked out. Stopped dead in it's tracks mid-transfer. I can't bring the drive back online, and ran a diagnostic when i was able to see the drive finally and that said it was fine. All of the videos from my cameras were on there and are now lost if i can't recover the drive. My laptop was dying from the load, so i already deleted them from there, figuring i already moved them, and they'd be backed up in short order.

So that's bad, right? Only got to edit one video and post it before this happened, and without pulling a youtube hack, i can't even get that file back. RJ is going back to college this week, and i hadn't gotten his files from him yet, so i called him up to do the transfer, especially if i've lost everything...

His drive just died over the weekend and he's scrambled to get it back up and running before he goes, because Apple's Time Machine wiped the drive. Yesterday was a train of phone calls and texts along the lines of "Well, at least your footage is still on miniDV, how long will it take to transfer, you have to do it at school because you leave in a few hours, how do we move that much in files around, either overnight a hard drive or leave me the tapes even though i have no miniDV camera to convert them or know anyone who does.

This is a headache. Can't anything be smooth? I guess i should be remembering i'm lucky. If breaking open the enclosure and taking the drive out to bypass the USB/Firewire controller doesn't work and the drive IS toast, it would be the first data loss i've ever experienced (due to luck as well as backing up since day one of working on a computer). The only thing that sucks is that this is all my video and photos from the project, which you can't re-create like a term paper (that may or may not be due in a matter of hours).

Crushed.