Back up your photos!

Good reminder. Backup is ESSENTIAL. Hard drives can fail without warning and COULD lose everything.

My golden rule is: TWO copies of every file, minimum, on different devices. I have three copies of really important files, on big hard drives, in different physical locations. The chances of all of your devices failing at the same time is much less than any one of them failing. Assume your hard drive will fail someday - WHEN, not IF, and be prepared. Even SSD devices - more reliable without moving parts - can fail or become corrupted.

When I travel and take thousands of pictures, I always put my pictures on my netbook then back them up immediately on a separate hard drive. So I have two copies immediately, on different devices. I can't leave them on the memory cards because I shoot too many pictures and fill up my memory cards usually in a day or two and have to erase them and start over.

However, simply "formatting" your hard drive doesn't really erase everything - it erases the disk partition's file table but not the contents of the files themselves. Most of them are probably still there and could be recovered (painfully and slowly) by a file recovery program, if the hard disk itself isn't damage but merely corrupted.

I don't trust the Apple store anymore. One of my clients brought me his daughter's Macbook recently. Unable to boot. The Genius Bar told him what you described above: sorry, no way to get your files back, all we can do is format your drive and try to start over. He brought it to me instead. I was able to recover everything in about ten minutes by booting Linux on the Macbook, something against the religion at an Apple store. I didn't even have to run a file recovery program - I recovered every file with its original name. But Apple's tools could not - or they just don't care enough at the Apple stores to try very hard. I'm not sure, because I'm not a Mac person.

Yeah - computer places can't always get stuff back that is still there with some effort put into it. Our computer crashed a few years back and tho I had some of my vacation/personal pics burned to DVD's, I hadn't done all of them. Took it to the computer shop and they were able to recover some stuff, but none of the photos. My cousin, bless his soul, is a bit of a computer whiz (understatement)...and he was able to recover almost all my photos that we thought were gone forever. I now burn all my pics to DVD after I get a certain number of them (or get back from vacay with 1000+) and we have a backup hard drive as well.

I don't trust discs either. DVD (and CD) discs that you've burned can deteriorate over time and become unreadable. And, burning discs is a slow, error-prone process. It is essential to verify any disc you have burned immediately as part of the burning process, to make sure it burned correctly.

Hard drives are so cheap and fast these days that it makes little sense to use discs anymore. Just buy more than one drive and synchronize them occasionally. Assume any drive will fail someday, just as you should assume that any DVD disc you've burned will become unreadable someday.

If you have a pile of old CDs and DVDs of archived photos that aren't backed up anywhere else, I would take the time to go through them all and copy them to a hard drive so you never have worry about having only one copy of those pictures, in case the discs become unreadable someday.

Here's another thing you might consider, uploading to some sort of cloud account. I don't do that, but I do something similar, which is, I have a Flickr "pro" account (basically it's the paid account vs. free, but comes with unlimited storage). I can upload all my photos there. Of course, Flickr is only for photos/videos and not for all files (like cloud would be). Granted, any online place can be hacked and if you don't want to risk that with your vacation photos then that's not an option. But online storage does offer a safe back up to physical storage in the event that: the house that your computer is in burns down or is broken into, the house that the safe that your hard drive is locked in, burns down and melts the safe with it...or is broken into....etc.

I also recommend using multiple SD or CF cards. I use only 8GB SD cards (they're cheap and about the minimum size you can get now) and even then, I switch to a new one after just 400 or 500 pics. Using a 36GB or 64GB card to store all your vacation pics on runs the risk of losing your pics if your camera should get lost or stolen. However, bigger cards are necessary if you are shooting video. I am not a fan of clouds yet due to security risks (Jennifer Lawrence anyone?). I too have a couple of stand-alone hard drives (one for the road; one at home) that I use the USB connections to my camera and my home computer to back-up or store. I just prefer to have prints made directly from the card and reformat once I have my pics. I also do not use my smartphone to take pics but mine does have a separate micro SD slot that I would save to if I did. Smartphones with this capability are becoming increasingly rare I think to move people to clouds for storage.

While traveling I back up the photos from the camera's SD card to my iPad nightly, and if WiFi is available, upload at least the "keepers" to a Picasa album. After I get home and the photos are edited, they are stored on multiple devices and on multiple cloud sites. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I haven't lost anything yet.

phred,

This is a great reminder! I agree, backup is essential and especially during travel, when there are other "hazards" to contend with such as theft, losing the camera or having it stolen.

If someone tells you that your hard drive needs to be reformatted and you'll lose everything on it, GO SOMEWHERE ELSE FOR HELP! At the very least they should try the following:

• remove the hard drive from the machine
• put it in a removable/portable/external device enclosure
• physically connect the drive to a working computer
• recover the files you want/need to thumb drive, etc.
• return the drive to the original machine and THEN do the format and re-install

I've had to do this several times for friends. It works.

I have several hard drives at home that stopped booting, but I was able to install them as secondary or external drives on another computer and recover all of the files.

Thanks for this thread!

I have about 10 years of videos on VHS and 8 mm tape (wedding, births, babies, young kids, travels etc) that I painstakingly converted to digital back in 2005. The process was such a bear that i stopped shooting video and have just limited myself to just taking photos the last 10 years. I had burned all the videos onto DVD's and just stored them in the cupboard. I never expected to pull them out again until i was in my old age after my wife, kids and friends have left me.

The DVD's are more than 10 years old. After reading this thread, Itried to play them on our desktop and i got a major failure message. I freaked. Luckily, the DVD's are readable on another computer and still work in a standalone DVD player. I have just backed up all the DVD's onto a desktop hard drive and will back up further on a portable harddrive.

Recordable CD's and DVD's can deteriorate. Exposure to sunlight can cause the media to deteriorate. The fine metal foil sandwiched in the plastic can eventually oxidize. If you drop them, the fine foil can also split. I now recall that the shelf life of DVD/CDmay be 5-10 years. So I am glad i was still able to back them up.

I still have the magnetic tapes. I have been told by a video expert that the magnetic tapes can last over 30 years. The problem is that even if the storage media is still good, the problem is finding a machine to play it. That was one of the reasons, i transferred my 8 mm to DVD back in 2005. My Sony camcorder had already been fixed several times on a renewable service warranty (the only time I was glad i kept renewing a service warranty on any device) and 8 mm camcorders were no longer being sold at that time.

DVD and CD players are also disappearing, so even if your discs are still good, you will eventually find it difficult to find a machine to play them.

Cloud Storage is an option. At this point, i have several hundred GB's of photos and videos. At that level, i would have to pay for storage. Also, i prefer to keep control over my personal info and prefer not to have it all out there in the nebulous cloud in the hands of others. Also, uploading times can be terribly slow unless you have very high speed internet access. Just trying to upload a single photo to share over a slow hotel wifi can up to 20 minutes.

The portable hard drives are so cheap that there is no reason not to buy several to make a couple of backups. Flash or SSD is an option, but disc drives come in larger capacities at much lower prices.