Reminder! Backup those photos

That really bites to have that happen to you, I am sorry you are having to deal with it.
When I joined this forum a couple of months ago a hard drive crash was one of the 1st threads I read and I started worrying about it. I started using an online backup service a month or so ago and run a back up every night now.
 
Sometimes it just seems that experience can be the hardest of all lessons learned - I also lost some info due to a virus and not backing up often enough.

I back up to 3 separate exterior hard drives every day. It is tedious, but I have all my info somewhat safe. I even keep one of the harddrives in a fire safe. I am not comfortable with online storage services just yet, although it seems the path of the future.
I back up my photos as I take them off of the card, it is almost painless at that point, even though I may have many saved that I will eventually delete later. To date I think I have just over 100,000 photos stored.
 
I have DVDs burnt of all the actual paid shoots that I do. I'm not a full time photographer, so its easy to manage at this point. I lost mainly personal pictures and things I was trying out, alot of the urban shooting that I do.

I got up to 1500 recovered RAWs, which is great. Still not everything, but some of the shoots that I take too heart (such as Remembrance Day) I managed to get back. Edits are gone, but at least the RAWs are back.

Gave the HD to a friend and he wasn't successful.

As I consider the data lost, my wife gave the HD to a tech a work while he is on sick leave to fool around with and try to recover the data. Won't hear back for a while though, but I view it as a bonus if he manages to get anything. He has done data recovery in the past...

When I do a shoot, I have a netbook with me where I store all the photos from the memory cards, so I'm covered for during the event.

I now have 2 external HDs at home and I set an automatic backup that gives me a popup each time I boot up my PC to backup to the redundant drives.

Thanks for the comments all, and you are right, we sometimes need to learn the hard way before we do it the right way. :)
 
Thank you very much for the reminder, I am backing up eight months of photos to DVDs right now! My burner is acting up and doesn't want to open the tray, so this will be a challenge.

I have been through the crashed HD woes, too...but it was at work when we still were saving all our work (newspaper ads and graphics) on our computers and absolutely no back up system available, this was back in floppy disk days. After losing hundreds of hours of work we were given tape backup systems and then later the central corporate backup systems that are being used today...but I'll never forget the despair of losing all that work!

I hope you are able to retrieve your images! :(
 

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