Recovering .blend files after a hard drive crash.

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

I used Photorec to recover 800+ .blend files from a half broken drive.

But I don’t think there was ever that amount of .blends on there.

When I try to open the .blends (which range in size from a couple of KBs to some being around 300MB, which doesn’t sound right…), I only ever get a “file incomplete” error message.

Is there any way to rescue these files?
Is there any way to tell differentiate between those that might work and those that won’t?

Thanks for any advice

#2

man, sorry to hear about your loss…

If all else fails, google file recovery… some of the services will not make you pay if they dont recover anything…

#3

you can try the append and link option to see or import content from the blend file maybe this works with damaged files.

#4

I don’t think they will :frowning: I’ve tried several, and appending does not work. Plus there are over 800 .blends, I can’t test them all :frowning: Is there any equivalent to photorec?

#5

I don’t know if you manage to recover the files. If they were fragmented (and it seems they were) there aren’t good chances. But if they are precious to you, you should consider a specialised company for data recovery. They will know better.

#6

buy 2 hard drives and run them in raid 1, that way you alwase have 2 copys of your data.

always backup impotent data!

a specialist company is your best bet at recovering them

#7

Try this tool, i find it has good results and it tells you how damaged the files are :slight_smile:
http://www.recuva.com/

#8

Thanks for the suggestion, but I don’t know how feasible this is - It was a Linux EXT3 partition that I screwed using Linux, I don’t know how I would check the 800+ files from Windows. Can I fix .blend files, do you know?

#9

Try Ext2ifs. it adds your Linux ext3 partitions as another drive in your windows installation. Very useful when you’re dual booting. It even allows you to copy files from win to linux (and obviously, vice versa) :
http://www.fs-driver.org/

#10

Through Recuva forum I get here, it nicely explains the problems when recovering files (on windows partitions): http://www.runtime.org/recoverability.htm

I think you have lost your files. There isn’t any magical program that saves fragmented files, because when hdd is really damaged (doesn’t need to be physical damage), simply if your filesystem is corrupted, the data on it are just billions of bytes. I looked once on a file recovery service costs, and only approximate prices were from 50 to 100 pounds.

So next time back them up.

#11

I spoke to the maintainer of Photorec via email last night, and he said something about Photorec not recognizing the end of .blend files. Perhaps this could explain why some are too small, some are too big, and all are incomplete?

Another tool I could use is Scalpel, but for this you need to specify the “header” and “footer” of the files you want to recover - Is this possible with .blend files? How can I figure what the header and footer would be?

So next time back them up.

I should have! :frowning: