External HDD Click of Death
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This morning I tried to download photos from my camera to my external hard drive, and I heard a funny thumping / clicking sound. The wheel spun and spun, but nothing was copied. Unplugging, plugging, rescanning, etc. doesn't work and it shows up as uninitialised (on my mac) - looks like it's dead.
Earlier this year I moved all my photos from my internal HDD onto this external HDD. Thank goodness I'm backing it up to a 2nd external HDD with time machine (mac) and I also copy all my photos to a second portable HDD which I use as a second backup / take with me / offsite backup.
I must admit that I've been very fortunate thus far, and that this is the first time ever that a hard drive has failed on me. I have not been as diligent in the past, and only started to take backups seriously maybe 2 or 3 years back - but now that I've actually experienced a failure, I can breathe a sigh of relief.
How about you? Have you had any backup / hard drive failure stories to tell?
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Not mine but a fellow camera club member had an external go bad on him... with NO backups.... he lost 6 years worth of images, other than ones he had used in competition which he had burned to DVD's.
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When I scanned a lot of slides we then backed up to CD's in 'Bitmap format' as that was the one that looked clearest (at the time)
Now a few of them wont load to computer. :|
Lumix LX5.
Canon 350 D.+ 18-55 Kit lens + Tamron 70-300 macro. + Canon 50mm f1.8 + Manfrotto tripod, in bag.
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I've lost one drive that wasn't backed up; it was an external drive that I'd retired, and it never came back when I needed it again. It was all older and unimportant material at that point, so it was not a huge loss, but I still would have liked to have some of the photos from it.
All of my media files (photos, audio, music) lives on a Drobo raid array, which is an upgrade from a Western Digital raid that was always problematic. I also back up all of my raw files to a second HDD when I import them into Lightroom: once that drive is full, it goes in the filing cabinet and I start on another one. It would be a massive hassle to actually recreate the finished images from the bulky raw material, but that's my safety net.
The other time I've lost images wasn't because of drive failure, but was a mistake that I made migrating images from an old drive to a new one. I thought I had copied some photos that I hadn't; I'm not sure quite how it happened, but that's the 'mistake' part of it. I've heard that this is a more common source of data loss than drive failure, but it's harder to find people who have suffered from it. 
My other backup strategy is to 'roll forward' my favourite (3-star and up) images from one annual lightroom catalog to the next, and they're all exported to a separate external drive that also holds the backup of my computer's internal hard drive, which is where all of my applications and lightroom catalogs are stored. As my 'in case of fire' drive, this is one of the LaCie Rugged portables that can be used without A/C power should I need to relocate my office to the local Kinko's. I've never had to use it, and I've also never tested to see if it would work, which is another weakness should a failure happen.
I also try to use my 160GB iPod as a portable backup drive for my 3+ photos, but I'm pretty delinquent when it comes to keeping it updated.
matthewpiers.com • @matthewpiers | robertsonphoto.blogspot.com | @thewsreviews • thewsreviews.com
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I'm not that organized - but I did do a full backup of everything to an external HDD today in your honor, Jules...
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Toad Wrote:I'm not that organized - but I did do a full backup of everything to an external HDD today in your honor, Jules... Haha, good job Rob.
I bought a new drive and started doing a restore from backup to it yesterday... 16 hours later and it's still going...
USB 2.0 for you...
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In six years I have had three hard drive crashes. I use a combination of internal hard drives, external hard drives, DVD's and a Drobo for my back-ups. I currently have around 6TB of image files I have to maintain and keep backed up. This grows at about a rate of 50GB per wedding.
Canon stuff.
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Imagine how many negatives you would have had pre digital. 
Is it possible to make a negative from a digital file?
Or something similar to microfiche?
Lumix LX5.
Canon 350 D.+ 18-55 Kit lens + Tamron 70-300 macro. + Canon 50mm f1.8 + Manfrotto tripod, in bag.
(This post was last modified: Oct 4, 2010, 03:58 by canonkid.)
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