[[email protected]]

Dear group,
after doing some research and asking questions in this newsgroup I
bought an Audio Technica stereo mic for doing field recordings of folk
singers; thanks again to those who answered my questions. I have been
using it with a Tascam HD-P2, and the whole setup has been working
very well so far, but recently I hit a major problem. After more than
a month doing recordings in very remote locations under very difficult
conditions, I made it far enough back into civilisation to find a
friend with electricity and a notebook computer (a Macintosh). I
thought it would be a good time to make a backup of the recordings I
had made, and connected the HD-P2 to the Mac using FireWire. However,
after trying to copy them to the computer, a set of files associated
with the currently active project on the recorder disappeared from the
recorder itself and didn't show up on the Mac. They represented
several days of recordings with ethnic folk musicians that would be
impossible to redo, so I would hate to lose the data. Also, several
other files appear to have been partially truncated, again on both the
Mac and the recorder.

My questions are whether anybody else has experienced similar
problems, and whether there is any hope of recovering the data. I have
done general Internet searches, and searches within the recording news
groups, but not really turned up anything specific. There seems to
have been some kind of problem with FireWire 800 on Macs a few years
ago. However, I doubt that this is the issue because, as far as I am
aware, the HD-P2 uses FireWire 400, and the Mac in question was bought
a couple of years after that issue was supposedly fixed. There were no
warnings or error messages during the transfer of files, just missing
and corrupted data afterwards.

I don't know whether it is worth trying to contact the Tascam
engineers for technical support as they are notoriously hard to get
hold of. Any advice would be greatly appreciated as I am desperate to
get the data back. Thanks,

Tom Ashby.

[Harry Lavo]

wrote in message
oups.com...
Dear group,
after doing some research and asking questions in this newsgroup I
bought an Audio Technica stereo mic for doing field recordings of folk
singers; thanks again to those who answered my questions. I have been
using it with a Tascam HD-P2, and the whole setup has been working
very well so far, but recently I hit a major problem. After more than
a month doing recordings in very remote locations under very difficult
conditions, I made it far enough back into civilisation to find a
friend with electricity and a notebook computer (a Macintosh). I
thought it would be a good time to make a backup of the recordings I
had made, and connected the HD-P2 to the Mac using FireWire. However,
after trying to copy them to the computer, a set of files associated
with the currently active project on the recorder disappeared from the
recorder itself and didn't show up on the Mac. They represented
several days of recordings with ethnic folk musicians that would be
impossible to redo, so I would hate to lose the data. Also, several
other files appear to have been partially truncated, again on both the
Mac and the recorder.

My questions are whether anybody else has experienced similar
problems, and whether there is any hope of recovering the data. I have
done general Internet searches, and searches within the recording news
groups, but not really turned up anything specific. There seems to
have been some kind of problem with FireWire 800 on Macs a few years
ago. However, I doubt that this is the issue because, as far as I am
aware, the HD-P2 uses FireWire 400, and the Mac in question was bought
a couple of years after that issue was supposedly fixed. There were no
warnings or error messages during the transfer of files, just missing
and corrupted data afterwards.

I don't know whether it is worth trying to contact the Tascam
engineers for technical support as they are notoriously hard to get
hold of. Any advice would be greatly appreciated as I am desperate to
get the data back. Thanks,

Oh man, I'm sorry. That's a bummer. I've never had any problems with
firewire transfers, but then again I don't use the Tascam machine.

I don't have too much I can offer...other than to make sure you do a
machine-wide search for the missing files on the MAC...if they were in some
sort of subdirectory on the Tascam the transfer may have arbitrarily created
a subdirectory somewhere on the mac and placed the files there. Also, if
you haven't already, search any "temp" folders created during the download.

[Mike Rivers]

On Feb 23, 3:35 pm, "Soundhaspriority" wrote:

Tom, I've just consulted the manual. The machine uses a FAT32 file system.
Because it is a standard file system, you have a chance
if you remove the drive and send it to a data recovery specialist.

The "drive" is a memory card. There's a possibility that removing the
card from the recorder and trying to read it with a card reader
connected to a computer might be able to see what can't be seen when
using the recorder as the card reader.

Contrary to your doomsday warning, the only times I've had trouble
with a FAT32 real disk drive have been because of pilot error or an
honest crash (which has happened to me once in about 10 years). I
don't have a very strong trust of those flash memory things. I know
photographers who have lost dozens of "rolls of film" for unexplained
reasons.

Sorry 'bout that, Tom. Maybe you'll get lucky.