Reminder=Backup Backup Backup

[Hogleg 44]

You'll never know when you'll need it!
I woke my Mac Wednesday, and a short time later a box pops up scolding me for turning off a drive without 'Ejecting' it!
How weird...I didn't turn one off!

The one year old internal 1TB Seagate had 11+ years of jpg's on it.
They were backed up on another disc, so I only lost about 5 hours restoring 550 GB of pics to a new drive.

The moral of the story is, Backup Backup Backup, you'll never know when you'll need it!

(The drive is under warranty, and is to be replaced)

[Murph]

YES! YES! Backup, Backup all the time.

[dmcantrell]

It is so ironic that you made this thread. Just now I was in the middle of making a thread in the wildlife section, and I was editing some images to go in the thread. The mouse stopped, the screen froze, and the machine stopped responding.

I rebooted -- black screen. Rebooted again -- black screen. Third reboot -- Windows cannot start because c:/windows/blah system file is missing. Fourth reboot gets me to desktop, I start a backup and it freezes complaining that my disk has surface errors...

I wish I would have made a backup yesterday. :(

[dbphotos]

Yes. I lost a bunch a few years ago and now I back up to another HD in my computer, a 4TB Drobo and online. Call me paranoid!

[dryicerx]

Not just backup, but VERIFY and TEST your Recovery-from-Backup procedures.

I've seen too many cases where people rely on automated backup solutions, and never verify it except for maybe the first time (a good example is the mag.nolia.com failure). Do this from time to time, it will speeds up the recovery in a real situation and will save you a load of time as well.

[Murph]

Backup, I learned the hard way. I now have my images on five different hard drives, two of which are external.

[Coogie]

Here is my plan:
So far my main computer still has enough room to where all my pics are still on it and I also have them on a 1 TB external drive so that's two easy copies for minor disasters and I do that once a week at least.

For very important things like family pictures I also make an annual DVD of the years' pictures and give it to family members for their benefit and usage and also as an off-site storage. I also keep a copy in a fire proof safe. I recently upgrading my flickr account to PRO too so I've been in the process of uploading all my pictures in full resolution there but that's proving to be a major pain in the butt since I have to create a set and collection for each directory i have individually. Hopefully it won't come to needing that for my recovery but you never know...

[Rson]

Originally Posted by dmcantrell

It is so ironic that you made this thread. Just now I was in the middle of making a thread in the wildlife section, and I was editing some images to go in the thread. The mouse stopped, the screen froze, and the machine stopped responding.

I rebooted -- black screen. Rebooted again -- black screen. Third reboot -- Windows cannot start because c:/windows/blah system file is missing. Fourth reboot gets me to desktop, I start a backup and it freezes complaining that my disk has surface errors...

I wish I would have made a backup yesterday. :(

I can get your pics...they are still there.

[dmcantrell]

Not to derail the thread, but I was able to recover. My C: drive is a RAID0, and one of the drives is failing. My last backup was unsuccessful and I didn't know it. Yesterday I used a spare 35GB hard drive, loaded Windows onto it, used that to boot the machine, and ran CHKDISK on the failing drives which found and repaired the problems. Now I am back up and running, and I have completed backups to external drives. Just now I ordered a 40GB SSD, and I will use that as my C: drive once it arrives. I also ordered a 2TB external eSATA drive that will be my new backup destination. Part of my problem was that I had outgrown my external drive backup capacity. The 2TB drive will alleviate that problem.

[heard03]

Backup for real! Within about a 10 day period my local external hard drive and pc both bought the farm. Fortunately I maintain 2 external HDs off site and only lost a song or two I had bought in the iTunes store and a few edits of original pics that are on the backups.

[ronocnikral]

don't forget to backup those lightroom catalogs, if that is your poison...

[picman]

For you Mac users SuperDuper does a great job of doing backups. I keep three bootable backups. One gets updated everyday. The other two are updated and rotated between offsite and onsite about every week or so.

[C!LLY]

I have 4 externals, 4 thumb drives, 3 computers, and 2 memory cards. I always keep something backed up somewhere....now if I can only get it all organized....or at least backed up on a series of disks.