All my photos... GONE!!!

dizzledazzle

dizzledazzle

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David
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HI all, just need to vent a little!

So, got some amazon vouchers as my xmas bonus from work and invested in a Seagate Freeagent external drive to put all my photos / music on. All was well, it worked a treat!

Then last week i took delivery of my new PC, it obviously didnt like my freeagent for whatever reason as it decided to corrupt it, although it was formatted to NTFS it now shows the filesystem as RAW and says its not formatted.

I came to terms with the fact that i had lost my entire photo collection and formatted it, put some of my friends music on it only for it to corrupt itself again!

Its currently with me at work and i have a Recovery program running, so far its found 7000 images, only time will tell whether i can get them off or not!

Im really hoping i can get them back somehow as they are more than images, its like my "photographic journey" from when i started up till now!

I recently found out that although its branded Seagate, the drive itself is Maxtor. that could explain a few things!
 
Im really sorry to hear that...............but you wont keep your precious irreplaceable photos on only one drive any more will you :shrug:
 
Never rely on just 1 backup.
 
another reminder for us all, I'm checking my backups when I get home!

Hope you get your pictures back, helped a friend with a similar failure and we got 90% of the stuff back but it lost the file names and folder sructure so he had a mass re-catalogue effort on his hands!
 
dizzledazzle said:
Thanks, im deffo going to be backing up on DVD from now on!
Click to expand...

DVD can be a hassle for backups, I just use a second external drive and match it up to my other drive once a week or when ever I do something significant. I use Microsofts Synch Toy which is free and an excellent 1 click solution for mirroring those important documents etc.
 
Hard drives corrupt and crash. As you found out. The 'perfect' illustration of why hard drives are not reliable for backup.

For backup use digitally stable optical media – DVDs, make 2 copies of each, store one off the premises. Burn completely new DVDs every 3 years (and trash the old ones) as DVDs are chemically unstable and will eventually become unreadable.

Another backup option is a serious RAID array (for serious dollars!).
 
If you are more IT savy then go digging around and find an old Tape drive most of them will store 90gb (compressed) on a tape and then you just need a couple of tapes, one in the house and one at a friends house.

Cheers
Euge
 
:agree: with W.Smith never never trust anything 'mechanical' with your data on it's own.

I back up to an eternal hard drive and then once a month to DVD as well
 
I had something similar happen to my photos, I recovered them but they wouldn't open in photoshop, so I tried lightroom and it was able to read them all, I then exported and saved them and alls good now:D
so now i do a dvd backup as well just to be sure it dosen't happen again
 
You should back up your precious photos to DVD or CD media regularly.

Don't just use any old DVD's either- make sure it's a high quality brand like KODAK GOLD PROFESSIONAL with 100 or 200 year life:

http://item.express.ebay.co.uk/Comp...tdiZ2038QQddiZ2152QQadiZ2188QQcmdZExpressItem

Next important point is to make sure you burn the DVD's at a SLOW RATE say 2x or 4x. Don't use the 16x or higher burn speeds as these are unreliable and often not readable again on other drives.

Test your back-up DVD's on another computer- make sure they can be read.

Store the back-up DVD's somewhere safe- in a fireproof document box in case of the worst. Store another set of DVD's in a different building.

Sounds like paranoia- but I'd be truly gutted if I lost all my treasured memories and hard work if my PC got nicked for instance.
 
Some DVD's don't like to be burnt at too slow a rate - you need to burn at the rate that is optimal for the media, so if you want to go for 2x or 4x then choose 2x or 4x rated media for the most reliable results.

Personally I'd rather just have a couple of (decent) hard drives mirrored. DVD's get stressed and lose data... Tapes are susceptible to magnetic interference. Plus it takes bloody ages backing up with them. HDD's generally don't go wrong too often (I have 10-12 year old quantum drives that still run (noisily, but) fine) as long as they are not Maxtors, IBM deskstars and the like.

I've lost plenty of data in my time, but I don't think anything is quite worth putting in a fireproof safe though... Perhaps if it were my business I would but none of my photo's are up to a level that I would say is that good yet anyway (it's not crap though).

I really do think a mirrored array is the best bang for buck when it comes to backing up data.

I'm gutted to hear the Seagate and Maxtor are the same company now - if that's true then I won't be giving any more money to Seagate. I have a free-agent drive and already I'm disappointed with it - it behaves like a maxtor drive anyway!
 
i always back up my photo's (family etc and hobby ones) onto 2 dvd's, one stays here at home and the other goes to my mum and dads house aswell :D
 
aahhh, scary, . . . I'm off to do a backup
 
dizzledazzle said:
HI all, just need to vent a little!

So, got some amazon vouchers as my xmas bonus from work and invested in a Seagate Freeagent external drive to put all my photos / music on.
Click to expand...

I had one of those - briefly. It died within 3 weeks of purchase. Fortunately nothing was lost.
 
i keep them on 3 different drives in 2 different pc's
 
I've changed my thinking about this recently.

So what if I lose all my images? I'll just go out and shoot some more.

The only stuff I'd be gutted to lose is the personal stuff like holidays, relatives, special events etc. Those fall into a very small quantity compared to evrything else I shoot. get backed up to a couple of dvd's and kept away from my home.

It's good not to be too attached to stuff. it stops the potential for the very traumatic suffering of loss.

3 different drives in 2 pc's?

what happens if there's a fire and both are destroyed?

You can't cover all the bases and it's pointless trying. Just accept that everything is transient and you'll be a lot, lot happier.

same goes for all tose people who covet their plasma tv's and fancy cars. You never know when it's all gonna disappear.

lol.


Seriously though. I hope you get them all back. I'd be upset for a few minutes if I lost all my work ;)
 
W.Smith said:
Hard drives corrupt and crash. As you found out. The 'perfect' illustration of why hard drives are not reliable for backup.

For backup use digitally stable optical media – DVDs, make 2 copies of each, store one off the premises. Burn completely new DVDs every 3 years (and trash the old ones) as DVDs are chemically unstable and will eventually become unreadable.

Another backup option is a serious RAID array (for serious dollars!).
Click to expand...

RAID doesn't have to be that expensive, last sept (06) i got 4 250GB SATA hard drives for £50 each, connected to a motherboard with intel ICR7 chipset.
Was originally running them RAID 5, 3 disks active as a 500GB drive, with one as a spare drive ready for rebuild should an active drive fail.
That seems to need rebuilding everytime the computer wasn't properly shut down, leaving me vulnerable until it finished, so I now run a mirrored stripe set.
The whole computer (case, psu, hdds, mobo, cpu&hs, ram, GFX) only cost me about £600, for a pentium D 945 (twin core 3.4) and 2GB RAM, 256MB nvidia dual DVI gfx, and reusing the optical drives from my previous machine.


For those of you with Mastercard or Visa, mozyhome will do unlimited online backup for $4.95 a month, or 2GB for free, plus 256MB for everyone you refer. I'm a user and will gladly supply my referal code for anyone kind enough to want to use it.
 
All very well and good until a pipe bursts and drenches your machine in water, wiping out all your disks in one go?


Surely, the more components you add to a system, the higher the risk of a substantial failure?
 
Raid drives and back-up hard drives are fast but you need consider the house-burning-down scenario. It does happen- the house next door but one to us burned to the ground last year- the family escaped with their pyjamas and their car everything else was lost. Since then I decided keep some back-up DVD material in the safe at work.
 
I back them up to my NAS, a USB HD that I keep at the Office and also burn them on DVD
 
Gandhi said:
You can't cover all the bases and it's pointless trying. Just accept that everything is transient and you'll be a lot, lot happier.
Click to expand...

Here is wisdom.

Seriously though, I reckon offsite (and online) backup is probably the way forward. If something's big enough to wipe everything simultaneously the world will have bigger problems than our photographs.
 
I agree with the online back up, but you should have more than one back up, I got for one onsite (hard drive) and one offsite (Mozy). The most important thing though is that the backup has to be automatic, or at least very simple. As if it needs done manually it is more likely to be missed.
 
laser_jock99 said:
Raid drives and back-up hard drives are fast but you need consider the house-burning-down scenario. It does happen- the house next door but one to us burned to the ground last year- the family escaped with their pyjamas and their car everything else was lost. Since then I decided keep some back-up DVD material in the safe at work.
Click to expand...

I would rather keep a usb hard drive in the safe at work and pop it home once a week or so for an update the DVD route is just to much hassle for me. (Which I do except I use a draw not the safe!)

Plus with the usb drive your effectively checking that your backup media is still readable once a week with DVD's the chances are you will never check them until you need then and you'll then only find out they don't work in an emergency.

I guess the real thing to take out of all this is that there are lots of options out there and we should all make sure we are using at least one of them. I know a few people who have lost all sorts of ireplaceable stuff like baby phots during a PC failure and I sure don't want that to happen to me.
 
dizzledazzle said:
I came to terms with the fact that i had lost my entire photo collection and formatted it
Click to expand...
What! I'd never do this! Run the recovery software as soon as you can. If the drive has failed once, try and get what you can off it, but don't use it again.

I'd never trust a USB HD as the only storage for my photos. What happens if you get burgled, or drop/spill something on it? I don't know about you, but my photos are very valuable to me. I recently bought a new 400Gb internal drive, and my photo collection has consumed more than 100Gb of it. If that lot went, I'd be devastated, I assure you.

The most important photos I keep backed up on two different internal drives (not different partitions, different drives), and then have a complete copy of everything on a USB drive hidden at another location. That way you have plenty of failsafes. Off-site backups are, in my opinion, very important.

Something else though... if you go to powweb.com, you can get 100s of Gb of disk space online where you can backup your photos. Ok, it might go against the T&C slightly (i.e. the files aren't available from a website) but I've never had any problems. This data is kept backed up by them, and is protected from any theft/disaster at home.

I know backup stuff's been covered time and time again, but it's no good thinking about it after you've lost everything.
 
I recently bought a blu-ray burner for PC and got all my RAW files & 15 years worth of memories all nicley backed up on one disc inc photo software ect gotta love new tech :)
 
Can anyone recommend any decent external hard drive brands?
 
I'd never ever use a device like that to keep a permanent copy of files. USB sticks mess-up all the time. Bearing in mind the amount of money we spend on camera kit, it shouldn't be hard to set aside a comparatively small sum to invest in some good quality secondary storage.
 
How about keeping some of your photographs on a website too, just another method of keeping shots of special events without the risk of losing them through fire or theft.
I have thousands of photographs of reptiles for a magazine I work on and we keep ours on two computers. Although I do like to make a dvd copy of special family photographs as I've lost most of my photographs once - luckily I was able to retrieve some of the special ones off the internet (reduced size and quality but that doesnt matter when you have lost everything else)
 
I had a maxtor drive With around 5000 images on which completley died. no chance of recovery. I did however have them all on my ipod aswell. Its with a specialist right now to extract them and load them onto a new drive.
 
Maxtor drives are probably (definatley) the worst out there.

Western Digital is the way forward for HDD's.

Ive got over the fact they are all gone, it does mean i have to go out and take loads more, although i wasnt 100% attached to them, there were some great memories there that im sad to have lost.

Its not the end of the world and im thankful that photography / Stock images is not my sole business!
 
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