Huge scare
Hi everyone,
I haven’t been able to update my gallery as I reformatted the computer and had a huge scare! Thanks to Windows’ inability to recognise large hard drives by default, it wiped out the partition data on my recent photos – roughly 12 months worth. I’ve been trying to restore it for the past few days and finally making progress on it.
This little (yet major) scare has made me ponder more seriously about backups since hard drives and external enclosures are fairly cheap nowadays.
I hope everyone has a backup procedure of some sort particularly of recent work!
Cheers,
Wayne
Mark Snelson
For the little effort involved backing up is so worthwhile when you hear stories like this.
I save my pics onto my internal hard drive and also an external hard drive. I also back up onto dvd once a month. I’d recommmend scheduling it in so it becomes routine otherwise it is easy to get lazy about it.
Cheers,
Mark
Tom Godfrey
I don’t think we can be reminded often enough about the importance of backing up and as you say Mark, it is too easy to get lulled into a false sense of complacency. Thanks Pirostitch.
Amanda J Slack...
My heart sank just reading that. I am obsessive in backing up because in the past I have had similar scares. The only thing I would add is to migrate your files to the latest version of the software you’re using. I work mostly in Photoshop and started back when it was version 3. Since then the coding has included reading on Mac/PC then pulled out again, as well as letting go of backwards compatibility. A lot of my problems were with the Mac/PC disk issue but it was a good reminder for me before I move to CS3 this week.
I am glad to hear you are able to resurrect the work.
Stephen Colquitt
Far out – I am a lazy backer upper. So scary!
InfinityRain
I’ve lost so many photos including an incredible air show I went to and a huge family reunion, I can completely sympathize with you. I hope you are able to completely recover all your images…..such a heavy loss to feel!
kookylane
Well…
I’ve lost all my files when my Mac died on me, actually I might have been able to retrieve the files if I hadn;t gone and rashly re-format my Mac, which in the end still doesn’t work (it was just time for it to die)
The saddest thing is, I do have an external hard drive which i bought half a year before, but was very lazzy when it comes to backing up. None of this would happen if I was wiser. Oh well, but there is no point in me regretting it, it was my own stupidity and just have to let go, whats old is old and its in the past, time to enter the new era, at least now I back up regularly.
Pirostitch
Well I’ve moved the internal drive to become an external drive now. So next time when I reformat, I’ll just disconnect it.
I’ll definitely be backing up each time I finish working on something – both RAW and processed files.
Looking at getting a theft-proof and fire-proof safe as well to put all the external hard disks and dvds in. Me, paranoid?!
kseriphyn
You didn’t have Vista did you? I’ve down the dreaded format C: a few times now. So frustrating when that happens. I have a habit of burning treasured files to dvd discs regularly now. In fact, you’ve remind me to do a backup.. Thanks.
Pirostitch
Nope still on good old Windows 2000. I’ve been getting mixed reports about XP SP2 – some say it does read large hard drives by default, while others have said no it doesn’t. Anyway I’m back up and running so at least I can get back to working.
Rob Young
Seen it too many times!
Next time Windows says it can’t read your data, or it completely dies, boot up a Linux Live CD (See www.PCLinuxOS.com or www.Knoppix.org as an example) and odds are it’ll read it fine and allow you to burn everything or copy across a network. It’s a complete operating system that runs from the CD (no install) .
I work in IT, and have retrieved huge amounts of data countless times from lazy worker’s laptops.
And…It’s all free!
Enjoy.
Pirostitch
Thanks Rob. Will keep it in mind and it was suggested to me to do that, but I didn’t have a spare hdd that large.
Belinda Strodder
A good reminder to us all. Especially the Linux solution.
I use an external drive all the time with my Mac but am aware that this could fail too, so I back up to CD every month.
And I trash the photos that are definately not worth keeping in order to save space.