Just wanted to complain.

I spent the past two work days making a new Railroad Spike ashtray and carefully documenting the process. Went to load the final photos onto the computer and the photo software flipped out. Couldn't use anything on the hard drive, couldn't even eject it. (I use an external hard drive, basically a giant memory card.)

After a few hours of blind fumbling, I managed to access the files and now I'm copying all of my photos to a new external hard drive. 418 gigabytes, over 51,000 photos. Says I've got two days until the copying is done. It'll probably only be 12-14 hours, but damn.

I'm terrified that my work photos will be corrupt or deleted. So many months of work hang in the balance.

Not nearly the worst thing to happen to a Brother, I know. Just worried/annoyed. Thanks for reading.

H

A lot of those portable drives never power off. Much shorter life span. Keep a second or unplug your portable when not in use

This one shuts down with the computer, but I guess that didn't help too much.. Definitely going to look into the GoogleDrive type things.

I never turn my computers off... that's a lot of photos to be in jeopardy. Glad you saved em

I never turn my computers off... that's a lot of photos to be in jeopardy. Glad you saved em

I may have a Polaroid camera I could trade you for a like a 12 finger ashtray. On a stand. Films on you.

raid 1 hot swap on a hardware raid controller.

b & w or color?

It's color. Instamatic, with flash cubes. I think a strip of five.

I got it in 84. First pics were taken at tiger stadium. I'll throw them in as well. Got a pic of Jack Morris on the mound.

And don't buy seagate, seagates are trash.

Ha! Got a family member who's a Bigwig at Seagate....... (I've got one from them, one from someone else. They both hold stuff, but the SG isn't what failed!)

Morris deserves to be in the Hall.

To eliminate the danger in the future, buy TWO external hard drives, and whenever you copy data to one, also copy the same data to the other, and in the same folder locations. Keep all the folders and files identical between the two drives.

When one of them dies, you just buy a new one, and copy all the data over from its twin, and keep right on going. Repeat whenever one of them dies.

The probability of them BOTH dying at the same time is very, very close to zero. If you're paranoid about that, do it with three drives instead of two. You may even want to keep one offsite in case your house burns down or something. For extra paranoia, never have more than one of the devices connected to the computer and/or a power supply at any one point in time (avoids malware or a lightning strike taking them ALL out simultaneously).

Remember that SINGLE drives are NOT to be thought of as reliable storage for important and/or irreplaceable files. Only MULTIPLE drives with identical contents are to be thought of (collectively) as safe for such files.

You may also want to create "media type diversity" by storing the files on both traditional magnetic hard drives and also flash drives or optical discs, to add resistance to environmental factors that wipe out only one technology (i.e. strong magnetic fields which can kill hard drive data but won't affect optical or flash media, or long age which may degrade the data on optical and flash media before data on hard drive media).

Hope that helps.

Carbonite......:-k

http://mozy.com/product/mozy/business .
Should always keep one copy off-site, and at least 1, but preferably 2, hard-copies on site. Back-ups should be stored on a more reliable media than an external hard-drive or flash drive - burn everything on DVD's.

Striping 2 or 4 external hard-drives together (RAID) will automatically provide redundant data across the drives, and may allow you to hot-swap a drive if it fails without data loss. But using a RAID is not a substitute for back-ups.

https://www.datarecoverycenter.com/services/hard-drive-recovery 

👍
Been using a RAID 10 (RAID 1+0) server for years. Most reliable server I've every had.

IIRC, this also provides the fastest access times as well because no parity data has to be caculated and written. Hot swapping is nice, but be prepared to write a hefty check.

In the tech world there is a saying that something is not backed up until it is backed up twice. One should be a local backup and the second should be an offsite backup (in case of fire, flood, etc...).

Also, RAID is not a backup it is just a redundancy within the same system. If the RAID system gets corrupted then you are equally screwed as you would be without a backup. 🌫