Data Backup

[Cussy]

As I mentioned in Jules' thread on her dead camera, I came back from St Abbs to find a dead hard drive. Now I am paranoid about backup, but still I thought I'd lost a months worth of photos. There were no diving ones, but the wife's holiday snaps were amongst them.

On boot, Windows XP would not recognise the hard drive and kept informing me that it wasn't formatted. A quick search on Google and I found a free phone number for a data retrieval company that could offer advice. They informed me that the Maxtor drive I have has a common fault that XP thinks is data based, but is infact a hardware fault. They informed me that because XP had auto run Chkdisk, there was every chance I'd lost all data. They offered to analyse the disk for £95 and extract the data, if possible, for a further £450.

Another search on Google found an internet-based data retrieval company that would perform the data analysis stage for free and then charge per GB for extraction. I ran the check, and this allowed me to know that all the photos were retrievable. The cost was $300.

So I thought there was every chance I could get the data off, so a final search on Google I downloaded about 10 demos and freeware for data retrieval. Unfortunatley none of the free ones worked, but a program called Restorer2000 let me extract files up to 64k, and these were all fine. So I invested the $50 and the end result was I got EVERYTHING back. At the end of the process, I was able to reformat the hard drive and it is now fine and works ok.

So the moral of the story is BACK UP YOUR PHOTOS. I've invested £50 in an external hard drive to act as a back up drive just for photos. DO NOT store all your photos on just one of these, as Jules' other horror story shows that if you drop that external hard drive, you will lose the lot - I've also had that happen. I also have a backup on DVD stored at my parents, just in case of fire at home.

So a quick search on Google brought the cost down from £545 to $50. I did loose virtually a week of spare time though.

Rob

[TimIngmire]

Well that's a result Rob. Those retrieval companies seem to thrive on people's ignorance - what a rip off.

I need to back up all of my pictures, the Manado stuff is now all on DVD but not readily accesible. I have my eye on a Buffalo Terastation which is very configurable and can sit nicely on a network and so will offer instant access.

You can also use a site such Flickr which will give you off-site back-up.

[Mike W]

My pooter also went bang - Windows Millenium and blue screen with no way to reboot. Spent time on the net on the works PC and found this is a known fault with no known cure save a re-load. Upshot, I lost one dive of pics (With a cracking lobby shot) and some family pics that were actually more important to me.

Anyway, I now back up to CD, two copies of everything, though I read now that CDs may not last all that long, just a few years or even less. My two year old CDs are still fine so far.

Oh, and I also do a 'best shots of the trip' CD (2 copies) with the stuff I really like!

Not as convenient as an extra hard drive, maybe, or even an on-line storage facility, but so far so good, and pretty low cost.

[Jules]

I bought a massive USB hard drive that I back all my pics up to, as well as making 2 CD copies, one for my home and one in my drawer at work. None of this helped me with the Tenerife problem as I hwas half way through the holiday. Next time I will take some CDs and burn a disk every night.

jules

[rjdiver]

Apart from doing the obvious of the backups to DVD/CD or off-site like Flikr, what about while travelling to remote locations and not wanting to take a full blown laptop?

Done some hunting for a device which is CF card reader, big hard disk and screen viewer all-in-one. Found a few worth a look, let me know what you think or if you had some experiences with them:

www.warehouseexpress.com - look under photographic/portable storage/portable hard drives

[TimIngmire]

The benefit of the Epsom is the ability to display RAW files but you you use the camera RAW+JPG option then the ability to view RAW is not much of a benefit.

I'm using the Archos AV 400 which comes with a 100gb HD, has a CF slot, plays music and videos. It's a nice little unit and when bought duty free isn't much more expensive than those available elsewhere.

Having said that none of these really allow to critically view your pictures so I'm back to taking out my laptop as well as the portable unit - max backup.

Tim

[browng]

Hi guys,

Just been wondering what the lastest thinking is about storage of photos. I noticed this thread from about 3 years ago and it looks as though it was evenly split between backing up each photo shoot to CD or keeping a hard disk back up.

My current thinking that I will use the my laptop for downloading current photos and post processing but I will also have a small backup device for the RAW files while in the field. When I get home copy all the RAW files to a large network storage device attached to the broadband router. In addition I will back up the whole lot every month to another hard drive along with all my current data files, Word, Excel, etc.

What's everyone else doing?

Am I just being paranoid?

[DDT uk]

I've invested in one of those memory sticks [8Gb]. As the D70s raw files are only 5Mb I reckon a week to ten days of shooting can be stored on just one if I weed out the dross. I also take a laptop so I should be able to keep 2 copies of each shoot. When I get home they then go on the PC and a portable hard drive. I should therefore have 3 seperate copies [the memory stick being erased].

Daniel

[triplefin]

Originally Posted by browng

Hi guys,

Just been wondering what the lastest thinking is about storage of photos. I noticed this thread from about 3 years ago and it looks as though it was evenly split between backing up each photo shoot to CD or keeping a hard disk back up.

My current thinking that I will use the my laptop for downloading current photos and post processing but I will also have a small backup device for the RAW files while in the field. When I get home copy all the RAW files to a large network storage device attached to the broadband router. In addition I will back up the whole lot every month to another hard drive along with all my current data files, Word, Excel, etc.

What's everyone else doing?

Am I just being paranoid?

I also asked this a little while ago - u must have missed the thread in your search
How do you store your pictures?

[browng]

Thanks for the link back to the June 2008 discussion, I missed that on my search. It looks as though having 3 copies on different media/locations is the recommended route to take.

Looks like another 1Tb disk is needed! It is not that long ago that only mainframes had terrabytes of storage now I need it for my desktop. What's next?