I never told him what happened, but he did seem to avoid me for the rest of the trip, so I suspect he knew what had happened, be it accidental or deliberate (probably the former).īeen troubleshooting computers and networks professionally since 1994. Another photographer on the tour wanted to see the photos I had just taken on a scenic stop in Bratislava, Slovakia (he was not an MFT user), but I didn't check after he handed me back my camera and that night I discovered all the photos had been deleted! Fortunately a card rescue program managed to retrieve them. The only time I nearly lost photos was on a bus tour.
When travelling I always back up all photos at the end of each day onto my laptop HD and to an external HD, so I had 3 copies of each photo file on 3 separate devices, at least one of which would be locked away in my hotel/accommodation during the day while I was out taking new photos. That ceased to be viable years ago as the file sizes increased and number of disks required became unmanageable. I used to be paranoid (stupid?) about the risk of a major EMP event and backed up important files and photos on optical disks.
As prices come down I am shifting progressively to SSD drives as the portable option (smaller, lighter, less sensitive to physical shocks). At work I have RAID 1 drives for further protection. These days, many of my photos sit in iCloud, but my main backups are on hard disks at home, at work and carried around with me. Guy, sorry that you are encountering problems.Ī major loss over 20 years ago (a robbery at work in that case rather than drive failure) convinced me to always have multiple backups in multiple places. The warranty replacement SSD went into a desktop as its C: drive and has been good for years now.īut yes, backup and then backup some more, there's no such thing as too many backups. Maybe 4 or 5 hours to get it working again. But lucky me always had the USB hard drive backup, so rebuild from scratch on a spare HDD drive and put back all the files from the backup drive. It happened to me with a notebook C: drive. dead without warning and unreachable and unfixable. SSDs are nice and fast but when they fail. Such as my NAS sends me nice emails at times indicating that drive #4 has had a few moments that it recovered from. HDDs seem to give warnings that they might be going strange, so then there's a chance to get stuff safely off to another drive or two. Some minimal critical stuff is also in the cloud. My stuff is in 5 places or more on various hard drives, on other computers in the house and on the NAS.
(They used to get noisy and grumpy first, now they just die). HD's don't always warn you when they are going to smoke themselves anymore. I was able to eke a few more files out with a file rescue program, but after that, it just was DONE. Fortunately, I did not lose everything, as it failed about 3/4 of the way through the transfer, but I did lose all my spring flower shots from 2020. The old drive (yes the one with all the images on it) had failed. I set up the transfer, let it run overnight, and in the AM, walked out to a large "DRIVE FAILED" message on the screen. I had bought a new desktop last year, and finally was getting around to getting it set up, and that meant doing a backup of the whole old computer to a new external HD, prior to sorting and putting what I wanted on the new computer's second drive. However, it had been about a year since the last backup. It was not giving me problems, and I did back it up to external drives, usually every six months or so (not shooting a lot in the past couple of years, so that was actually fine). Had about a 5 year old 2 TB HDD in my desktop it was used exclusively for all of my photos and nothing else. As years go by things get more reliable so the intervals between disasters stretches out to the point where memory fades and we think everything will work fine forever. I have worked hands-on repairing computers since 1963 and my standard saying is "anything can go wrong at any time". That will teach me to use 2TB backup drives.Īnyway, peace of mind even if I need to trash the drive as it's all backed up as well on my NAS. Looking for bad clusters in user file data Next run CHKDSK H: /R and found zillions of orphaned files and other disasters, right now it is in Stage 4. my backup USB HDD on this notebook just now started giving failure messages under Syncback when it tried its hourly backup.