What A Plonker!
Author
Discussion

Andy M

Original Poster:

3,755 posts

289 months

Saturday 7th October 2006
quotequote all
Last night while trying out new photo viewer software I stupidly deleted 5 years worth of photo's silly

'No bother' thought I, 'I'm no numpty, I'll have a backup somewhere'. Only then did it dawn on me that I'd deleted the backup a couple of weeks ago so overconfident was I that I needed the space more than I needed the backup.

The result: I was up until 4am frantically searching for the missing photo's, and then up again at 7am. Thankfully I've been able to rescue around 95% of my shots, but it was not a nice feeling to think that I'd deleted what I now know to be very dear to me.

The lesson: backup, backup and backup your photo's again and again. They're too precious to be blasé about

andybuk99

312 posts

259 months

Saturday 7th October 2006
quotequote all
yep quite right, the price of hard drive mb's is so cheap there is no excuse.

i run 2 external firewire enclosures with 250gig drives in each, i copy all my images from one to another and when they fill up i simple store one at the studio and one at home. in my opinion time is more important and expensive than mb space so i save all the raw, tiffs with layers and any other variations of shots so they dont have to be replicated.



Edited by andybuk99 on Saturday 7th October 12:31

fergusd

1,251 posts

300 months

Saturday 7th October 2006
quotequote all
I have 4 backups, 3 on disk on different machines (one machine auto-backups all the others every night) and one offsite on optical media . . . years of losing stuff and seeing others lose stuff makes you paranoid . . .

nightmare . . .

Fd

graham@reading

26,553 posts

255 months

Saturday 7th October 2006
quotequote all
I keep meaning to do DVD backups - at the moment they're backuped to an external NAS Terastation (4x250GB drives). I've got three of those boxes Not for photos I hasten to add.

UKBob

16,277 posts

295 months

Sunday 8th October 2006
quotequote all
You were lucky / well done for recovering the files.

I know a poor chap who hasnt lost anything yet, but has the dilemma of having 15 terrabytes of data - he isnt quite sure of the best backup method.

Its been done many times in other threads, but you can *not* rely on optical media in the long term. Many of the cheaper dvd spindles have a "safe" shelf life of only a couple of years.

franv8

2,212 posts

268 months

Sunday 8th October 2006
quotequote all
I've had CDRoms fail after only a couple of months, so I tend to back mine up to a Lacie 250Gb hard drive and also to DVD's. The external drive also spends most of its time back in its box, unplugged 'just in case.'

One of my good pals nearly lost all of his despite running a RAID configuration on his server - his machine got knocked out in a power cut/surge, and it took the non-raid drive out with the operating system. Luckily he too, managed to salvage it!

I guess the only real answer is to increase your chances by backing it up into multiple formats/places!

UKBob

16,277 posts

295 months

Sunday 8th October 2006
quotequote all
There is no substitute for multiple drives manually backed up and stored in different locations. Being in the IT game, I lost count of the number of people I spoke to over the years who have lost *everything* from a virus, crash, etc.

I wouldnt dream of keeping my backup drive plugged in.

poah

2,142 posts

258 months

Sunday 8th October 2006
quotequote all
I only store lewis's pic and they are stored on three drives and DVDs