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I’ve lost my hard drive…wippeee!
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A word of warning to newbies who store their images on a hard drive. I have a system hard drive and a second internal hard drive exclusively for images. I started my main computer this evening and it started to beep like car horns on the Champs-Elysées. Went in to lightroom to pick up an image and everything was listed in red and says it couldn’t be found. Going in to explore and my hard drive is no more. Am I worried…not on your Nellie!!
ALWAYS back up your images. I have an external drive from LaCie that I bought from Barkers (Sponsor here) and this has saved my life. Today (Sunday) in Aldi there’s a 750Gb drive for sale for €119. Do yourself a favour and back up your images. You’ll smile with relief when it happens to you!!!
Alan
Sound advice Alan. thanks for the reminder. I havn’t backed up in months.
Dave OS
As an IT head, when I built my PC I installed a RAID 1 system. Two hard-drives, one mirrors the other. If I have a problem with one, the other automatically switches in. With harddrives being so cheap, it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Good advice Alan, Like all things in life, nobody thinks its going to happen to them.
Stephen.
Good work Alan.
I have a Time Capsule for my Mac, it is the business; and an external drive (Lacie too); and also I do occasional backups to an over-gigged iPod that runs my music system. A bit belt and braces.
All I need is a burglar to swipe the lot.MartinOC wrote:
Good work Alan.
All I need is a burglar to swipe the lot.
Interesting point that about the burglar, when backing up it makes a lot of sense to store your backup drives in different locations, even different houses for obivous reasons.
Stephen. :wink:
Thats the best advice that everybody should take onboard. I will just add to it by saying don’t just backup your images on an external hard drive …………… do so on 2 external drives. I learned the hard way in 2005 and spent £1200stg having a recovery done which was great at the time and saved me in lots of ways but was not exactly 100% satisfactory.
I now backup everything on DVD and 3 hard drives also.
So basically we should put two hard drives in each room of our house and two deposited in a swiss bank safe…? I started writing out my images this weekend on papyrus rolls and burying them in a cave, I’ve heard that’s safe, too. Oh, no wait that was a dream.
randomway wrote:
So basically we should put two hard drives in each room of our house and two deposited in a swiss bank safe…? I started writing out my images this weekend on papyrus rolls and burying them in a cave, I’ve heard that’s safe, too. Oh, no wait that was a dream.
Not a bad idea :idea:
Mate i know what you mean my HD has been poping out warnings all week and i have been told it will fail within the next month or so, i have all my stuff backed up but still its the bother of re-installing another HD.
I also have a mate who has my images backed up on his system just in-case, he is actully talkin about building a server and offering a storage & back up service.When I was burgled earlier this year they went through every nook & cranny in my house. They nearly swiped my laptop but amazingly left my camera bag and other (backup) external hard drives alone. When I say ‘nearly swiped’, the laptop was ready to go in a bag (MY bag!) together with my most expensive Canon L lens, but may have got panicked and dropped it as they fled. I consider myself exceptionally lucky.
Off-site backup is highly recommended.
I also recommend tethering hardware at home in case the inevitable occurs.
my HD has been poping out warnings all week
Lucky you! All I got was the equivilent of the hard drive sticking out it’s tongue at me. Something like a computer generated naa-naa-na-naaa-naaa. I lost some work but mostly the images that were Photoshopped which I foolishly disregarded when it came to backups. I’m not even touching the computer until the replacement drive goes in…just in case.
Wise words Stasber. It’s often that I leave home with all my equipment laid out so it wouldn’t be difficult for someone to change my hobby from photography to hunting/shooting.
As a matter of interest some here say they backup to DVD as well. How does your workflow handle this? I always catalogue to year/location/location date. Do you back up to DVD for each shoot, or periodically zip a batch away?
Alan.
Only my original CR2 RAW files go to archival quality dvd ala DAM Book dated “buckets”.
Apart from that I have a hard drive [in my desktop machine] for my work-in-progress and another for finished/archived work, and 2 backup copies of all; one at home, one offsite.
Due to my very close call, my kit is locked in a secure cupboard these days, that includes my laptop. It’s a PITA to take it out and put it back in every time but I’m leaving less to chance that way; seems that in this society it’s necessary “just in case”. Several laptops go missing from hotel rooms for traveling employees every year in my company, just because they’ve not been secured/hidden – you’d expect a hotel room to be secure. Makes you think.
One question that arises out of this, and I appreciate may be worth a thread on it’s own. What backup software do people use?
Microsoft’s incremental back-up appears to have problems with the sort of sizes most people would need to backup their image library? I’ve forgotten the exact size limitation but it gets to something like 1Gb and says ‘hey thats me done’. So at the moment I am ‘backing up’ by doing a (not particularly) periodic full copy to an external drive.
Any advice on something more sophisticated?
Gary
I just do a duplicate of my images through Lightroom where I bring all my images to. I use Acronis as a system backup but I have to admit I’ve only made one backup in the last 6 months. It effectively does an image of your drive to be put on to DVDs or another drive then it produces a cd so that if your drive did die you could boot from this CD and replace all of your original data as if you hadn’t ever had a problem…allegedly.
alan.
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