External HDD: worst backup plan evar

[mrcrassic]

Thought I was doing the right thing keeping my photos on a 500 GB Western Digital external drive. Seemed to work well till yesterday when the drive wouldn't show up in Windows Explorer when plugged in. Thought if I got the drive to show up, it'd be OK.

So today the drive shows up but when I try to look at a folder it comes back and says "the drive is not formatted. Format now?". Can't see any pics, kinda assuming I'm never going to again... five years' worth.

Data recovery starts (starts!) at $500. I make a couple bucks doing photography but certainly not enough to justify this.

Just thinking about what I won't be able to see again makes me sick.

You did the right thing backing them up to an external. If your pictures were REALLY critical, you could have bought some online storage space and placed them there.

Data recovery is NOT cheap. Some shops run "specialized" software to get your data back, while others actually open the drive, swap platters to a working drive (considering that the platters aren't damaged) or switch logic boards, then recover your data...all of which has to be done in a dust-free environment in order to prevent complete destruction of the platters.

If your pictures are worth it, pay the money.

 

[Garbz]

If your pictures were REALLY critical, you could have bought some online storage space and placed them there. .

Really? Because the recent demise of the cloud company Linkup shows that even if you are a large enterprise and pay large enterprise money to have a cloud company store your data online you can still lose it all. (btw Linkup went bust after they lost somewhere between 20 and 45% of their customer's data, oh and data recovery doesn't work here).

This is only one case, but online services are generally new so give it time and I'm sure we'll hear of more. History goes to show that if you want something done right do it yourself. Being an expert like IBM didn't stop IBM losing some mainframe data tapes a while back either, and being as rich as Amazon didn't stop their cloud going down because of a software fault (no data lost in this case though the cloud was down for a while).

 

[Joves]

Another tip: if you're using an external HDD, just connect it and back it up once a month or once a quarter. If the thing is permanently on and connected you run greater risks of misconections.

Exactly! I see too many people leaving their externals connected all the time. I also back my pics up online so it is way seperate from any of my drives. Smugmug now allows you to store RAWS on their site.

 

[Imaginara]

I'd like to re-iterate.. one backup is no backup. And online backup is just ONE backup =) So make sure you have more than one backup.

 

[TUX424]

you shouldlook at setting up a RAID
with maybe 2 500gb HDD and that will have great protection
but it wont get the old data back

 

[Claff]

Digging this one up from the dead just to relate a mostly happy end of the story. Wound up taking the drive to a data recovery place that managed to recover about 99% of my stuff and put it on a new external drive. It was not cheap, however.

We learned a pretty expensive lesson here, but probably one that won't be repeated if at all possible.

 

[Iron Flatline]

Good for you.

Now, back up multiple times, and burn DVDs of everything. And don't keep them all at one house.

 

[JerryPH]

ALL hard drives are mechanical devices with lifespans measured in MTBF hours. DVDs are more of a pain to maintain but at least have lifetimes of decades. Some DVDs have lifespans of more than a century.

No matter what you do, if you put all your eggs in one basket, it is foolish to think that this won't happen... I do not care what kinds of hard drives or DVDs you use. It will. It *always* will... it is not a question of *IF*, but *WHEN*.

Make multiple backups of the things you hold important. How you deal with it now, will define whether you will be laughing or crying when it does happen.

A good idea is to just also open a safety deposit box and place your most precious memories there in a fireproof vault at your bank.

Glad to hear someone got lucky and got back a lot of what was lost... thats an expensive but happy ending.

 

[javig999]

I recently had an external HDD go out. As I was waiting for a new laptop to arrive, and my old one was unreliable I had not backed them up and dropped the drive. $1900 later...I got my photos (and other files) back.

Now I have them on two separate laptops (160GB), one external HDD (500GB), and have yet to produce DVD copies (I know...I know...I will get to it) to store in our safe.

Shooting RAW however takes up a lot of room so already starting to think of larger solutions for the future...

 

[Frequent Traveler]

Yes, this is a great topic to re-visit!

I'm pretty convicted b/c i've been relying on 1 320gb external HDD. Furthermore, it's been illustrating some glitches lately so i believe i'll be getting a second one this weekend!

I do have all my photos backed up on dvd (3 copies), BUT don't want to have to rely on them (and they're not really accessible to me).

Yup - a good reminder indeed.

 

[AlexColeman]

I actually have 4 backups(OCD). My main hdd in my mac pro, two redundant raid arrays, and an offsite storage, Blu rays in a safe deposit that I back up every couple weeks. Of course, that is for the business.