Importance of a Back-Up

[BKGInc]

About a month ago my backup drive crashed. I was using a Western Digital MyBook 500GB. I have everything stored on it. Using about 350GB, mostly photos. I used to have everything stored on my computer hard drive and then also backed up onto this drive. Well my computer started acting up because I had the hard drive almost full. So I wiped it all out to free up space and make it run smoother. I had everything saved on my WD MyBook so I was good. I know that for back up purposes you should have everything saved in at least two places so the plan was to buy another back up drive and back up my back up. Well…………..I never got to it and the unthinkable happened. I went to access my files on my back up and it had crashed, hard! I went into panic mode. I ended up taking it to Best buy to the Geek Squad and they had it about a week and couldn’t do anything with it. They said it was too far gone and that I should just take a hammer to it and destroy it. No kidding! That’s what they told me! At lease they didn’t charge me anything. I talked to a friend and he had a friend that was a computer tech. I gave my drive to him and he was able to pull ALL of my stuff off of the bad drive and put it onto a new Seagate back up drive. YEAH! So it turns out I didn’t lose anything! BUT it was a very stressful time. It just cost me 3 hrs of his labor and the cost of a new back up drive. Plus, I even bought another back up drive so that I can now back up my back up. This will NOT happen to me again. You really can’t put a price on all of your photos and work from the past few years. So I want to pass on my experience to all of my friends here on POTN to stress the importance of a good back up.

[Naturalist]

Your friend should work at BB. You're lucky you got all the images back! Thanks for sharing the warning.

[oRGie]

Good heads up for anyone leaving it till tommorow ;) but now you have 2 back up drives, are you keeping one of them somewhere else ?

I have 2 back up drives, well 3, but 1 has everything on it, 1 has just the photos, the other has everything else. The drive with everything on it and a wallet with all the negs from my film days live somewhere else :)

[zelseman]

You sir are lucky. I need to buy another backup. Thanks for the reminder.

[BKGInc]

Right now I just have both drives exact the same. (mirrored) In time I will probably change the organization and then keep one in my fire proof safe.

[RPCrowe]

When I travel, I copy my images from my CF cards to a pair of small physical size 500GB Western Digital "My Passport" external hard drives. I don't usually do any post processing on these images except to batch rename them and to view samples to discover and interdict any photographer or equipment problems. I will carry one hard drive in my carry-on bag and my wife will carry the other in her carry-on.

At home, I have an additional pair of desk top external hard drives, an Iomega and a Free Agent. I keep one of these hard drives on my desk attached to my computer and another hard drive in a fire resistant file cabinet in my steel RV garage which is on my property but, not attached to my house. I back up the contents of the desk hard drive to the garage hard drive at regular intervals.

I only keep selected images on which I have completed post processing on my computer hard drive.

[Hogloff]

Right now I just have both drives exact the same. (mirrored) In time I will probably change the organization and then keep one in my fire proof safe.

If they are mirrored like in a Raid setup, then they are not safe. You can still accidentally erase files, and the raid will automatically erase the same file from the mirrored drive.

I use a Drobo unit for my main drive setup and have a separate set of external drives that I backup to whenever I put new files onto the Drobo unit. The external drives stay in my office at work...far away from my main drive.

[BKGInc]

If they are mirrored like in a Raid setup, then they are not safe. You can still accidentally erase files, and the raid will automatically erase the same file from the mirrored drive.

I use a Drobo unit for my main drive setup and have a separate set of external drives that I backup to whenever I put new files onto the Drobo unit. The external drives stay in my office at work...far away from my main drive.

Oh ok, well then maybe I don't have a "raid" setup because right now I have to manually copy my files and folders to each drive. The drives came with back up software but I'm currently not using it. I am using the drives like flash drive in that I have to manually put my files and folders on to each drived separately. It's time consuming but I just don't want to go through losing everything again.

[nordlysBW]

Try and use Free File Sync for example:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/

to cut down on the manual copying tedium. That won't exclude human error, but speeds up synchronizing your backups.