My external 300gb drive fell over today and now it won't boot...
I'm hoping I can get it repaired.
I know data recovery is awfully expensive, but it would seem that physical repair of the drives components isn't that expensive... I guess the success of this depends on whether or not the plates were damaged in the fall...
This drive not only contains all of my photos, but my tutorial videos, my writing and my music collection which I brought with me from Australia as MP3s...
I have an external 300g HD that I use to mirror my main drive. The odds of losing both drives at the same time are very low. But to be on the real safe side. I also back up my important files (including pics) to DVD regularly.
I feel your pain. I lost my main storage drive earlier this year - wouldn't spin up at all. I never did recover it. I now have RAID'd drives in the box itself AND an external backup drive. And that reminds me, I haven't backed up my photo folders for about a month... You have more on yours than I did on mine - it'll be worth it to find a good recovery company if you can, but unfortunately it will be expensive. The problem isn't the cost of the parts to rebuild the mechanics, it's the fact it has to be done in a clean room to prevent damaging the plates.
I'm a frickin' genius. I had been religeously backing up my photos on an external hard drive. I had to re-install my computer so I made sure the backup was fine; it was. So I reinstall the computer and "copy" all the images to my re-installed computer. Had some more problems so I re-installed again. It turned out the hard drive on my computer was bad. So I went to re-copy the backed up images to my computer when i realised everything was gone. I had used "cut" instead of copy ... nice move dumbass. I was able to recover some files with recovery software but ended up losing a lot of photos.
For simple things like when the drive stops spinning, freezing it overnight helps. Worked for me once. It works again long enough for you to copy all your important data. Physical damage is a different story though...
Here is a link to an online backup website. I haven't tried this yet but is was refered to me by a friend. It's $5 a month for 40 GB. Not sure if there are any hidden costs etc...Might be worth checking out though.
It works for me, it works for many of my photographer friends, and it works for small businesses.
1. Buy two of the largest hard drives you can afford/find. Space is cheap, and upgrading is a pain. 40¢/GB is a good deal.
2. Buy two external USB 2.0 or FireWire (whichever your computer supports) drive bays. They should have an internal fan, and look for ones without a wall-wart (the big plug that blocks other outlets next to it)
3. Place drives in bays, and attach to your computer. Format if necessary. Instructions should come with the drives & bays for this.
4. THESE DRIVES ARE TO BE USED FOR NOTHING BUT PHOTOGRAPHY DATA. NO EXCEPTIONS!
5. All your data gets COPIED to Drive 1. Make sure it's all there before continuing.
6. Now, make your first backup, COPY the data from Drive 1 to Drive 2.
7. Every time it's necessary, copy the data from Drive 1 to Drive 2.
Notes:
* If you buy the drives and bays separately, you can save quite a bit of money that you can then spend on larger drives. All you lose is some time to assemble, and some crappy backup software.
* I like manual backups because you always know exactly when the last backup was, and if it completed successfully.
* You can automate this process with a script of some sort if you want (I use ROBOCOPY) but be careful to not assume that once the script is setup, everything will be fine forever. Check it!
* Turn off or unplug Drive 2's bay when not in use to protect against power surges or viruses.
* The command-line I use to backup with robocopy is:
robocopy *.* /S /E /PURGE /ZB /NP /XD "System Volume Information" RECYCLER
* Robocopy can be found on Microsoft's Windows 2003 Server Resource Kit, SS64 has a great article on the program.
