Hard drive crashes - how do you backup?

After reading samnooskas sad story of loosing all her pics of Lupo because of a hard drive failure, I am wondering what the answer is.?


I store all my photos on a cd and then also put them all on a hard drive.

Is that enough do you think?

Should we have two hard drives or three???

What do all you guys do?

This gets to be a difficult issue when you have to archive so much stuff as I have a lot of stuff for work that i keep too, presentations, training material, music etc. etc. With the price of hard drives falling, simply backing up everything onto two hard drives is about all you can do when you have large amounts of data. If you take it a stage furthetr you should have the drives at different locations too.

If I was backing up really important pictures say from a wedding or commercial shoot, you may find the final shots (rubbish deleted) including all edits could fit onto one or two DVD's that could be archived seperately and kept safely.

CD's do become unreadable. I started burning my own CD's approx 1999, breathtaking process that it was at the time (!), and I have ahad a few over the years that became unreadable as the dyes deteriorate. Back then i bought some of the more expensive Kodak Ultima Golds (before supermarket spindles became available) and not one has failed simply through the dye fading.

I use my laptop for a lot of things and even with over 100GB of space on my MacBook i fill it up regularly.

We use a hard drive on the network which is one of a twin set or mirror, what gets backed up on one gets copied to the other, this operation has saved lots of photos as one of them has failed in the past, but luckily had backups on the mirror so we just replaced one of them and copied everything back over from the mirrored hard drive.

I also have a portable hard drive, and it was when i was emptying the laptop onto this portable one to later transfer to the ones on the network that my digus of a puppy Lucien, hurdled the coffee table it was resting on, kicking it off in the process. It fell about 2ft and as it was in use at the time and had componants moving on the inside the disc got damaged and i was unable to get back the files i had copied off my laptop as i was relocating the masters at the time Despite the disconnection from the hard drive, my computer thinking it was still connected continued to transfer the files into well, the air around me!

Lesson learned in a huge way!! Lucien has never since hurdled the coffee table. And when relocating masters i copy them to a hard drive first, then move the masters over to a 2nd hard drive. It was a painful lesson

Have you ever contemplated a RAID drive. That is, your system running off three drives instead of one. That way, if one drive fails, then there is enough information to recover the data onto a new drive.

I used to have a raid set-up - where one drive mirrored the first drive, but on my Mac I have a raid stripe (2 drives into one to make them faster) and a time-machine back up. I also do a hard back up onto another external drive.

But to be honest I don't really save that many photos - only the ones I really like.

It isn't a case of if your hard drive will fail, it is a matter of when. If you keep it long enough it will eventually go.

In my computer I apparently have 2 hard drives with data being stored away from the systems. I also have 2 EHDs as photo archives.
I really must get around to storing one of those elsewhere because at the moment if I had a fire everything would go up together!
Flickr is also an extra storage system and all my favourites are on there.

I keep all my pics on an external hard drive but I MUST get another simply to keep a duplicate of everything.

That said everything that I've uploaded to Flickr exists on there as full resolution files so could all be brought back.

I just had my C:/ drive wiped out by a virus so I can tell the precautions I use work. I have two 500 gig hard drives in my desktop, C & D. I install all my application software on C:/. Everything I create with that software gets saved to D:/. I have all the software titles and Activation/Authorization keys saved in a simple text file I print when I add something new. I backup D:/ drive on DVDs about every month, copying the new photographs, music & software download compressed files. Doing things this way allows maximum usage of both hard drives. Most viruses will go for C:/ drive. I have the original software DVDs backed up as well as copies of downloaded software Zip files. I've not lost anything using these precautions. It is important to make copies of your original installation DVDs as a crack in one will render it useless.

I use AVG security software which was active and running when the virus wiped out my C:/ drive.

I have 2 external hard drives, the price of decent storage has dropped so much seems silly not too buy them. Have discussed RAID with my resident computer geek recently, and when we looked the price of purchasing RAID has also dropped, so it is something I will be considering to buy soon. I also use my Flickr to store a copy of any full res file that is extra special to me.

I lost some pics of the kids a few years ago, before I got into photography, nothing special except to me, so hard lesson learned.

I store on DVDs and on hard drives off PC. I probably don't store them safely enough TBH - and really should start looking at the way I do things!

xx