The fatherly/brotherly advice-nag thread... Back your work up!!!

Yes, its time for the semi-annual nag from your photographer kook friend who nearly lost his work due to hard drive failure.

For three days I've been prepared to leave for my annual Colorado gold rush but a series of mishaps has kept me at home, but the last of which became a running nightmare that we all dread. The loss of our lifetime of work.

My Seagate 1.5 Terrabyte drive died, containing nearly 100,000 shots over a 7 year period. Recovery looks grim unless Seagate's warranty can actually recover my work miraculously. (A sidenote, Seagate has had a notorious track record with their 1.5 Terrabyte drives, buyer beware!)

Anyway, I'm fortunate that I keep my work backed up on multiple drives both internal and external as well as much of my work stored online. I still did lose about three months of work but it could have and should have been much much worse had it not been for preventative matinence. So dont let my near disaster become yours! Back up your work.

This has been an annual public service announcement

Bryan, sorry to hear the bad news. No doubt many of us learn the hard way. Thankfully for me it was early on and after a couple PC drive rebuilds then I finally went to 3 externals that are mirrored. Seems like one cannot have enough backup at times. At least shooting film does have the advantage of re-scanning and processing, as I have had to also do at times.
Thank you for your reminder here.

Thanks for the information, Bryan. I'm kind of lapse on backups. I just do one
CD per file. That's not very good. Even as a hobby, I'd rather not lose my work.

I've got a seagate 300gb and recently bought a WD 1tb. Hopefully both drives won't fail at the same!

Thanks for the warning, I have two 1.5 TB external drives from Seagate, one is still in the box. All my files are on the 1.5 TB and backed up as well. This is not the first time I heard these drives are failing (after I bought them off course).

Capture the Scene of the Light
Inge Fernau
SF Bay Area, California

Website – http://www.magicalglow.com
Facebook – Magical Glow Photography
Twitter - Inge Fernau
Blog - Journal of my travels for the perfect photo

Unless you’re prepared to expect the unexpected, you’re likely to miss capturing nature’s finest moments (Galen Rowell)

Also wanted to mention it's a good idea to have an offsite backup as well in case of fire, earthquake, robbery etc. You can either use one of the online backup sites ($5/month unlimited for BackBlaze and Mozy, but it will take a while to do an initial upload), or store external hard drives in a safe deposit box or friend's house.

I go with the external hard-drive method and have two external hard drives that I rotate every month at the 'safe' location. This is in addition to a mirrored 2 drive setup on my main workstation for day to day stuff. At worst I can lose a month's worth of work this way, unless my backup fails during the same 30 day time period as a home catastrophe.

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but in addition to my photography I have a large investment in music and other data that would be simply awful to lose.

Thanks for the reminder and glad to hear you didn't suffer a catastrophic loss. Especially those fine Lake Elsinore wild flower images.

Yep buying a 2 TB external raid hard drive has definitely let me sleep a bit better at night. Mike's offsite backup is another great piece of advice too.