I'm like Stefan. I rarely trust hdd backups all of my files are on CD/DVD. even blueray disks are quite cheap now for 24odd gb of virtually faultless storage. just time consuming burning them but least it's permanent. I tell people at work if you're using regular external hdd don't put anything on there that you're not prepared to lose, always have another copy somewhere if it's important. and I would recommend the western digitals over Seagate or Toshiba anyday.
fingers crossed the computer man can do his magic.
matt
Don't be totally reliant on CDs\DVDs. The normal burnable ones have a life off about 5-8 years. It's a photochemical process and it is not totally permanent. I've lost a pile of Rally pix I took back in 2005-6 that were on Cds, the disk just became unreadable as the chemistry changed.
This is the main drawback to digital photography and I am sad for you that you lost them.
Most times it is not the disks that have died but a fault in the electronic circuitry, or connection leads. There are, as mentioned down the page, people who will recover the data by testing the circuit for the fault and repairing it. Or disconnecting the disks and connecting them to a new pcb circuit.
Worth getting a quote at the very least rather than lose it all.
Don't be totally reliant on CDs\DVDs. The normal burnable ones have a life off about 5-8 years. It's a photochemical process and it is not totally permanent. I've lost a pile of Rally pix I took back in 2005-6 that were on Cds, the disk just became unreadable as the chemistry changed.
Ive never had problems, I just tested tdk gold cds from 2001 and they're still readable. I only ever used tdk or Kodak gold as they were the only cds that'd work in my cars stereo at the time. I havnt burnt anything for some time as I've had no computer but I tested in my sisters comp no probs.
" TDK rates the archival lifespan of its cyanine-based CD-R discs at 70 years (based on accelerated aging tests). This paper presents data that reflect TDK's decade-long research and development efforts in the field of optical recording media."
matt
even this disk is still readable with degredation on the outer edge and many scratches .. I dunno I'd use media then hdd anyday.
lmao have a look at that Photoshop version haha. I actually forgot I had mitsui cdrs. a spindle of 100 of these still cost over $250. I know I use to pay over $10 a disk back in the day, worth every penny I say because they still work. (16 years)
Until a week or two ago I had my library on the iMac which has time machine backups every hour, but to free up some space I transferred the library to an external and was yet to buy another for backups. Only a day too late!
The drive seams to still spin, it just won't mount. I have tried repairing on the iMac but no go. It's in town now at a computer bloke who is going to run some of his program's on it. Lets hope he might able to get something off, I think the library is around 240GB.
Jo
If this is the case you will still have everything except the last couple of weeks stuff in the Time Machine backup.
You may need to trawl through the backup directory, but it'll be there.
Of course I'm assuming that you Time Machine backed up to an external HDD.
I'm totally reliant on good media .. be it hard disks or DVD/CD . you get what you pay for, I think I have shown that cds can last. they were burnt with Ricoh burners too.
hope all is good for you Jo, and I hope a bit of time
burning to good media is better then a cheap hdd. also I store my disks in a box in a closet and still on the spindle
matt
If you put your hand on the drive do you still feel it powering up on a computer start or hear a ticking sound?
If yes it may be possible to access the data with the aid of this recovery application. If it is your computers main C:\ drive that has failed you can boot into this program via the supplied bootable disc image. It does not matter if the failed drive does not present itself to Windows or can no longer boot Windows OS it just needs to power up. You will also need a USB external HDD to copy the data over.
Change the HHD to "Slave" & connect it to another computer. See if you can read any files. If you can copy them to the "Master" HHD. Then your data is safe.
I'm going to fall back on DVD's for storage from now on.
My "good" 3tb HDD I bought last year won't stop rebooting. It's never been dropped or over heated. My 3rd ext HDD to crash and burn.
I totally feel your pain brother.
Learning a lesson for next time: buy a $100 1TB external drive. Backup everything aftter you have important data (astrophotos, etc).
I always backup my individual .CR2 frames after a photoshoot of the sky. During a trip I take a larger SD card with me so make a backup and store it separately in case my camera or laptop will be stolen.
I'm going to fall back on DVD's for storage from now on.
My "good" 3tb HDD I bought last year won't stop rebooting. It's never been dropped or over heated. My 3rd ext HDD to crash and burn.
I totally feel your pain brother.
if you do, you should buy specific archival dvds, not the cheap ones. theyre usually labelled as such. I would recommend gold CD-r than DVD. if you can afford them these are the best you can buy http://www.mam-a.com/ (mitsui)
I just couldn't use DVD's as archival. My Nikon has two 16Gb memory cards, it often comes back from an outing full, each astro image from the Sbig would easily be 10-20 Gb in raw data.
I have several Tb in backup drives. I back my photos up periodically to two external drives, one I take to my sister's place and leave it there, she drops one off to me at the same time. I would have thousands of DVD's if I used them, far too many to store anywhere in the house. Not to mention the expense.
Just buy two backup drives and make sure you duplicate every backup, then leave one somewhere else in case of disaster. Much more effective and cheaper in the long run I bet. Cheap external 3 or even 4 TB hard drives are easy to get, if you don't have that much to backup, then the smaller ones are really cheap.
Its bad you lost the data but it isn't really bad luck !
Without backups its was a planned inevitability.
But I think anyone who has lived with computers has lost data at some time or another !
All hard drives will die eventually - this you can rely on - some much sooner than others.
So if you arent backing up religiously then you are simply playing a continuous game of Russian roulette and the outcome of that is well known.
Its almost a certainty that you are going to lose everything potentially as often as every 2-4 years ! - if you dont back up
Some of this is simply related to the MTBF of your drive, but some of it will be physical damage or electrical damage from the environment or even your PCs power supply
Anyone on this forum doing AP and who puts any value on their data and all the effort that it takes to accumulate it - and the effort to get all the software and all the drivers and all the settings and parameters working just right - simply must start backing up.
Not just doing it once, but establishing a process where it can happen regularly and preferably automatically
Even if you arent backing up the entire system, at least the Data areas as a minimum - the OS and apps are relatively easy to rebuild - albeit very time consuming (like 40-50+ hours) and fraught with all sorts of version control problems that may make it impossible to restore back to what you had, but the data is usually irreplaceable.
USB drives are cheap these days so there is no excuse that it costs too much, as was once the case.
NAS servers can be built cheaply, even out of old hardware and a bunch of drives, as mentioned internet backup servers are available if you are happy using and paying for them
I run a cheap NAS file server on a 7watt 1GB Intel Atom micro PC (Fit-PC2) that has an internal and an external drive, the external drive is swapped over every so often and I cycle between three external drives.
So I have 4 copies of the data of different ages (at least one of which is stored at another site and 1 of those copies is no more than 24 hours old)
But I also use a Linux service called RSync which updates my "changed" data across the net to one of my work fileservers every night.
RSync is a really smart program that literally runs a service at each end (source and destination) and only sends the new bits or the changed bits of all the files and reassembles it all
So for example a 300mb accounting file may only actually have 20kb of changed data - so that is all that gets sent across the net even though the file is 300mb
Its quite typical that a small business of say 5-10 employees running an accounting system, email and everything else the backup only needs to exchange a few 100mb of data per night - so its uses a very small bandwidth.
The very first time you do this it makes sense to use a hard drive copy of the data to get 1TB of data across to the remote server.
So that's my fifth backup which is itself replicated (mirrored) on two drives on that server.
I have other non critical files (music etc) that resides on my desktop that I dont treat so seriously, but it still gets synced to a Time Machine every night.
I really think that anyone who gets involved in AP needs to consider Backing Up as a critical component just like the camera, mount and scope are critical !
Until a week or two ago I had my library on the iMac which has time machine backups every hour, but to free up some space I transferred the library to an external and was yet to buy another for backups. Only a day too late!
The drive seams to still spin, it just won't mount. I have tried repairing on the iMac but no go. It's in town now at a computer bloke who is going to run some of his program's on it. Lets hope he might able to get something off, I think the library is around 240GB.
I am currently going through this pain. My hard drive crashed and the files were not recoverable, without it costing me for recovery. New drive, not that expensive, so okay. Out with the 'backup' on a portable 1 Tb hard disk drive, but that wouldn't do a restore, corrupted files.
No problem, I will just restore them from my other portable HDD, manually.
In the process of copying files over, my portable hard drive failed too, I couldn't believe it, and that was only about a year old. I thought I had lost my 2013 US trip photos I had copied some of the more important photos to DVD. Fortunately, though, I hadn't yet reformatted my cards for my next trip in May, so was able to recover those.
Luckily, I did have a third HDD with copies of files.
Now, I am in the process of reinstalling programs, a time consuming process. Once complete, I will do a new backup, onto two HDD's, one, as a master copy, the other to be used as the ongoing backup.
I am going to buy two new drives.........I will have four back ups! This process lately is making me a little paranoid.
Also, it is a great point raised here about the longevity of DVD_ROM's. I think a strategy of copying from the back up HDD to new DVD's every couple of years, seems like a wise idea.
As a further point, I also leave one of my back ups with family, as Rally suggested, off site storage, in the event I lose the originals, due unforeseen disasters. I know someone that lost his house in a fire and the one thing he couldn't replace.....photos, although in his case, they weren't digital.
So, as good as digital photography is fantastic, it has one major drawback..........secure storage.
I guess that is one advantage of storing to 'the cloud', but I have an issue with my stuff being secure on there. I don't like the idea of others being responsible with my personal data.
Cheers Pete
Last edited by Stardrifter_WA; 16-04-2014 at 08:21 PM.
This year I bought a new laptop. It was a well respected brand and at the upper end of the range. Four weeks later the hard drive died. They replaced the whole laptop. It just shows that disks can fail at any time.
When I first started using a desktop computer in 1984 (51/4" floppy drives, DOS ver 2 ) I quickly learnt two important principles.
1) If you type in a command (no windows or mice ) and the system responds with "are you sure? Y/N" always respond with N and think about what your doing (don't have to worry about this one any more) and :-
2) The 11th commandment; " Though shall back up thy data lest the plagues of lost bytes descend on your house"
Sorry to be a bit flippant about a very irritating event but using computers in the old days when hardware wasn't as reliable as it is today drove home some very painful lessons.
Until a week or two ago I had my library on the iMac which has time machine backups every hour, but to free up some space I transferred the library to an external and was yet to buy another for backups. Only a day too late!
The drive seams to still spin, it just won't mount. I have tried repairing on the iMac but no go. It's in town now at a computer bloke who is going to run some of his program's on it. Lets hope he might able to get something off, I think the library is around 240GB.
Jo
Hi Jo,
If it becomes a no-can-do repair (hopefully not), I have heard of drives whose platters are not damaged (and maybe even those that are), having their platters transferred in to another identical hard-drive, solely for the purpose of data recovery.
I had copied some of the more important photos to DVD. Fortunately, though, I hadn't yet reformatted my cards for my next trip in May, so was able to recover those.
