Crash & burn (Page 3): After I read a reference to Sinology I went to their web site to see what was involved. It seemed dauntingly complex and suitable only for IT professionals.

berchman Loc: South Central PA

whitewolfowner wrote:

I had a synology and had to return it. Couldn't get it set up and their reps didn't have a clue either. Went with Qnap and love it and their tech support is right on and friendly to boot.

After I read a reference to Sinology I went to their web site to see what was involved. It seemed dauntingly complex and suitable only for IT professionals.

Abo

Shoot film.

Negs and slides don't "crash"... everything else does... ;-/

Reinaldokool Loc: San Rafael, CA

grampy26 wrote:

Just learned that my external hard drive which held my pics is unrecoverable. Unfortunately I did not have all of them backed up some where else. Hard lesson to learn and am looking into the best and least expensive way to have multiple back ups.

Depending on your finances and the importance of those pics, there are companies who probably can recover the images for you even from the deadest of drives. It may cost $2-400, but if you want this, it is doable.

revhen Loc: By the beautiful Hudson

grampy26 wrote:

Just learned that my external hard drive which held my pics is unrecoverable. Unfortunately I did not have all of them backed up some where else. Hard lesson to learn and am looking into the best and least expensive way to have multiple back ups.

Also look into an online backup such a Carbonite. Saved my skin -- and thousands of pictures. The is a "belt and suspenders" situation.

Picture Taker Loc: Michigan Thumb

I used Carbonite and found the don't want photographers. As you add more pictures they slow you down. I ended-up taking a day to down load a days shooting. Talked to a Coabonite person and they explained we take too much space and they slow us down as we use space. That is when I went to back up Hard Drives. 2 Sets of them to cover each other.

blackest Loc: Ireland

Reinaldokool wrote:

Depending on your finances and the importance of those pics, there are companies who probably can recover the images for you even from the deadest of drives. It may cost $2-400, but if you want this, it is doable.

There are 2 main area's where drives fail the hdd controller and the hdd platters themselves. The first can be salvaged with an identical controller from another drive. However the usual problem is that the heads have crashed on to the platters usually they ride on air just above the platter but if they land it is pretty much an interference fit and the spindle motor can not overcome the drag from the heads.

What I've managed to do is open the drive wind the heads back to the parked position. closed up the drive and the drive is recognised and readable but it will die within a couple of hours. since there was no clean room tiny particles which on the scale of head platter gaps are boulders are now inside your drive and wrecking havoc. You pretty much have one chance to read the data from the drive before it dies completely.
I got around 90 95% back. Which the owner of the drive was delighted with. I think they lost a couple of movies nothing personal and unique.

you could pay to get the data recovered but it probably will cost more than you value it. It still will cost to make at least two separate backups at least of the recovered data.

jimmya Loc: Phoenix

grampy26 wrote:

Just learned that my external hard drive which held my pics is unrecoverable. Unfortunately I did not have all of them backed up some where else. Hard lesson to learn and am looking into the best and least expensive way to have multiple back ups.

One thought you may consider that I've been thinking about. What about using a large size flash drive for a temp backup until you can burn them or back your files up another way? Just a thought.

ricosha Loc: Phoenix, Arizona

For what it's worth, I've had a few crashes and have lost photo's. I met with some of my computer friends and explained my problem and this is what we came up with, moderate pricing. I run on an Pc, operating system is on a 500gig solid state hard drive; desk top storage hard drive is a two terabyte (spinner). Photo's are stored immediately on a 4 terabyte Western Digital solid state portable which I've set up to back up to a Buffalo storage set to raid 1. I have an eight terabyte Buffalo, raid 1 gives me 4 terabytes of storage. The nice thing about using a server style backup is if a drive goes bad, pull it out and copy it's twin to the new drive and you are rolling again. When I say server style, I mean the Buffalo has it's own chip and board. I store my Lightroom catalog on my 2 terabyte spinner (desktop hard drive); backing this up on the Buffalo. Rough costs are $400 for the buffalo and $200 for the Western Digital. The items were from Fry's Electronics. This way I have three levels of photos. Tips, I clean out bad photos before they go to the drives and I buy equipment that is roughly last years best, cuts cost drastically.

revhen Loc: By the beautiful Hudson

Picture Taker wrote:

I used Carbonite and found the don't want photographers. As you add more pictures they slow you down. I ended-up taking a day to down load a days shooting. Talked to a Coabonite person and they explained we take too much space and they slow us down as we use space. That is when I went to back up Hard Drives. 2 Sets of them to cover each other.

Indeed. It took three plus days to download photos from Carbonite BUT I was happy to wait because I got it all back. What I am saying is that the best arrangement is onsite backup PLUS online. For example, if you have an onsite disaster such as a fire you still have resort to your saved files.

BudsOwl Loc: Upstate NY and New England

aellman wrote:

Contrary to what some have suggested here, there is no hard drive-based solution that is foolproof.
I have Carbonite cloud backup, which, when added to backup drives, gives you protection as close to perfect as you can get. www.carbonite.com
>>>Alan

RiverNan Loc: Eastern Pa

are you certain.....?
I thought that happened to me too.
the sound that thing made was referred to as a death rattle.
however, I contacted Seagate the manufacturer and they were able to recover everything for a minimal rate and sent all the images back on a new external drive.

grampy26 wrote:

Just learned that my external hard drive which held my pics is unrecoverable. Unfortunately I did not have all of them backed up some where else. Hard lesson to learn and am looking into the best and least expensive way to have multiple back ups.

whitewolfowner

berchman wrote:

After I read a reference to Sinology I went to their web site to see what was involved. It seemed dauntingly complex and suitable only for IT professionals.

They are too complicated for their own tech's; a real bang up company. Get a Qnap if you want a server of 4 or more drives. Qnap's do a lot more the Synology's do anyways. If two drives is good (remember the future), then WD makes tow drive my books.

Desert Gecko Loc: desert southwest, USA

In response to some concerns/comments I read in this thread:
1. Amazon offers a cloud backup and I'm pretty sure Amazon is going to be around for a while, so bankruptcy & losing a backup is not a concern. Amazon's backup is free for Prime members, and contrary to comments in another thread I read here recently, it does include backing up RAW files. The backup is not automatic, though, and it is very slow. Plan on it taking many days or even a week or more running 24 hours/day to complete an initial backup.
2. According to an objective, comprehensive review by cloud backup company Backblaze, Hitachi makes the most reliable drives, by far. Take a look at this data: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/
3. An external backup drive is a good idea but nearly 100% effective only if the drive is kept in a location away from the computer to protect against theft or damage from fire, flood, rampaging elephants, etc. To guard only against a hard drive failure, an extra internal drive used for backup is faster and easier; but to also guard against gremlins and whatnot, either a cloud backup or an external drive kept at work or wherever is necessary.
4. I think a second backup drive, or backup of a backup is really unnecessary. Odds of a primary disk and a backup disk failing simultaneously are very low, and if you backup regularly to an external drive you will know it is in working order before you need it. This is especially true if also using a cloud backup.

Having considered all of this, IMHO the best solution is a combination of an external drive backup and cloud backup.

whitewolfowner

Desert Gecko wrote:

In response to some concerns/comments I read in th... (show quote)

Storing your photos on your main drive is not a good reason fro the following:

The photos will slow everything down
main drives are usually not the largest ones in the system, since they have everything else on them, makes them extremely limited
The main drive is the most used and is the most likely to go down
For anyone who has any amount of photos, their library will shut down the mani drive.

Remember; to always back up your photos on at least two different drives. It's not if your drive will go down; it's when will your drive go down!

Desert Gecko Loc: desert southwest, USA

whitewolfowner wrote:

Storing your photos on your main drive is not a go... (show quote)

Good point, and I did not mean to imply that you should store photos on the OS drive. I have several internal drives, the largest of which is a 2TB Hitachi I use as my primary photo storage drive. I use my OS drive for apps, docs, and miscellany. I use other drives for other purposes, such as other boot drives including an SSD for LR & PS only.

I tried to keep my reply simple, but now that it isn't, I also recommend a dual-boot system. I've experienced a couple of hard disk failures over the years, but since XP I've always ran a dual (or multiple) boot and I've been fortunate the failure wasn't on the primary drive so I was able to boot to the other drive and retrieve all of my data before losing any of it (the boot loader should not be on the primary drive, but even if it is, it's simple to bypass and boot to the working drive.)

And regarding the SSD, I like the performance very much, but after setting it up I read that it's as good or better to use an SSD for the scratch drive when using LR or PS, and that it's not necessary to actually boot to and run the software from the SSD to realize the fast performance. I haven't been able to test this, though, because when I boot to my primary platter drive and run LR or PS, they won't show the SSD as an option for a scratch disk, and I haven't bothered to troubleshoot.

Finally, you are correct about the eventuality of an HDD failure. Even the most reliable drives, according to Backblaze (Hitachi drives), have a failure rate around 1% per year.