cbtsam Loc: Monkton, MD

Just about two weeks ago, the 4TB desktop hard drive that has my images from 1/1/19 to present crashed, and within a minute the 10TB backup drive crashed as well, leaving me with just the 4TB drive with 2018 and before, and an empty 8TB drive, as well as some distress.

Within 5 days, a 4TB drive arrived in the mail from Backblaze with all of my 2019 & 2020 images, as well as a 14TB drive. The 8TB & 14TB drives are formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as soon as I hooked them up. If it makes any difference, they're WD My Book drives. I copied the 2.6TB of stuff from the Backblaze drive to the 8TB drive, and set Time Machine to work backing everything up to the 14TB drive and to Backblaze. (The Backblaze part didn't work until I contacted them and they had me update my copy of Backblaze. Who can say why?)

The big remaining problem is with Photoshop or, rather, with the Bridge part of Photoshop. Images from the old 4TB drive, containing the 2018 & prior images, open in Camera Raw when double clicked, just like before. Images from the Backblaze backup do nothing when double clicked, neither on the 8TB nor the 14TB drive. When I right click to "open in camera raw," I get an error message: "The Camera Raw settings could not be applied because there were no Camera Raw files selected or selected files were read only." The files in question were Nikon NEF files, and resetting all the permissions to Read and Write does not seem to have accomplished anything. However, when the same file is right clicked in Finder, and Open With Photoshop 2020 is selected, the image opens in Camera Raw, just like it is supposed to.

The first Adobe technician, after remotely playing with my computer for about 1.5 hours, suggested I copy the 2.6TB I'd copied to the 8TB drive to the 14TB drive, and then reformat the 8TB drive. I called Adobe again today to ask which format to choose for the 8TB drive and was told it's current format was perfect. But after about 3.5 hours on the phone with a second Adobe technician, we've got nothing at all, except a promise to "escalate the case to the techs' superiors, and perhaps to a 'level two technician'."

I've gotten over the crashes; these are predictable even though they're never expected, and that's why I have Backblaze. I've gotten over the trouble with Backblaze because it's over and nothing is lost. Going from Bridge to Finder to open anything, however, is a serious drag on my workflow.

Does anybody have any experience with anything like this? Any ideas?

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

In Bridge, what happens when you select File/Reveal in Finder? (Windows shows Reveal in Explorer, so I assume it is similar in iOS).

Try resetting Bridge:

Start Adobe Bridge and immediately press Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows) or Command+Option+Shift (Mac OS) until the Reset Settings dialog box appears. Select all three options--Reset Preferences, Reset Standard Workspaces, and Purge Entire Thumbnail Cache--and then click OK.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/can-t-delete-files-in-bridge-2018/td-p/9705058?page=1

And, as somebody who suffered through disk crashes, how ever did 2 drives fail within 1 hour?

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

New thought: Are the newly restored files in identically named folders as the ones on the previously crashed disk?

cbtsam Loc: Monkton, MD

Reveal in Finder yields absolutely nothing.

How those two drives failed virtually simultaneously - 1 minute, not one hour - I have no idea. It my well have been operator error, as I seem to recall moving USB plugs around in my hub, assuming falsely that it was the hub that was at fault, but I was so distressed about the first one failing - everything from 2019 on - that I truly do not trust that memory.

cbtsam Loc: Monkton, MD

Yes, sorta. Originally, the drive was called something like Pix II, so it came back from Backblaze in a folder called Pix II. In turn, when I copied it onto another drive, I put into a folder called "untitled folder." Thus, the full name of the files begins with "14TB" followed by "untitled folder" followed by "Pix II." Originally, it began just with "Pix II."

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

Strange.

And, since you mentioned Time Machine, did you have a previous TM image available, or is this a new protective measure?

I was sitting here one day, minding my own beeswax, when my Windows10 screen goes blue, and the message Drive E:\ boot record not found. 😬 E:\ was where all my photos, all of them were stored.
Luckily, a few weeks before, I had moved everything to my E:\Dropbox folder and it was all backed up into the Cloud. Replaced the drive the next day, reinstalled Dropbox and set about restoring. 2 hours later everything was back and intact.

Part 2 was a major investment in backup security. A Drobo 5C, 5 disk RAID5 with Seagate Ironwolf drives for the primary data store, all backed up in realtime with Dropbox. Netgear dual-drive NAS on gigabit LAN with Seagate Ironwolf drives with Acronis True Image (like Time Machine) imaging the photo datastore 2X per week.

Not inexpensive, but far less than losing everything.

cbtsam Loc: Monkton, MD

No, the TimeMachine image was on the backup drive that failed with the current photo drive! Rather a perfect storm, were it not for Backblaze.

Yes, your solution has been recommended to me before, but is, as you say, not inexpensive to say the least. I guess I'll stick with Backblaze for now. If the market ever bounces back hard before my time is up, and makes me a wealthy man, I'll consider that approach. But don't you still have to worry about crashing drives? So what, exactly, does all that money buy you? I know there was a discussion of RAIDs recently, but I didn't follow it very closely, since I know I'm not going to put that kind of dough into it.

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

My Netgear NAS is configured with RAID mirroring, each drive is an exact duplicate of the other. If one fails, I insert a replacement and the remaining drive rebuild the new one into an exact duplicate. The Drobo is configured as RAID5, the data is "striped" across each disk. If one drive fails, the remaining 4 can rebuild the datastore when the new disk is installed.

And, based on what happened in 2008, I think the market will bounce back, depending on what happens in November, in about 1 - 2 years.

cbtsam Loc: Monkton, MD

I'm sure the Dow will come back, though it took about 6 years from the low in '07 to regain it's prior peak, and I strongly suspect we haven't seen this bottom yet. Anyway, if I fall into some money, I'll look into your solution; by that time, we'll all have access to huge SSDs for an NAS or a RAID array. Meanwhile, be well and be safe.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Also just want to point out, for all the non-believers in cloud storage for off-site DR, that this is another story where the cloud saved years worth of data after a double drive failure.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

OMG that Is an amazing coincidence that two independent hard drives crashed within a minute of one another! I’m sorry that happened. Good thing you had the 3rd backup. Sometimes it’s easy to get a little cavalier thinking “why do I need a 3rd backup, what’s the chance of 2 drives failing?” Well the chance was 100% in that case.

RE permissions, did you change permissions on the files, or the drive? When I have had problems with permissions I have found I had to change the permissions on the volume itself and also the folders in the path.

Why? Maybe Bridge is writing something to the disk, maybe a temporary file, that is in a different location on the drive than the files themselves.

cbtsam Loc: Monkton, MD

Well, that could be tedious with 2.6TB of files, changing the permissions on each volume, folder, & file! But I tried it with one drive, folder, folder, folder, & file, and it didn't change anything.

Anyway, thanks for your suggestion, but it doesn't seem to be working here.

11bravo

Rare that 2 HDD'S would abruptly absolutely fail. I'm not familiar with Mac's file formats, or running Windows on a Mac, but I do know that in Windows, unplugging a drive while it was being written to can screw up the Master File Table. There are programs that recover/rebuild the MFT, rebuild the Master Boot Record, or recover a lost partition.

I use GetDataBack from runtime.org. It's a paid program but has worked several times for me when a drive lost its file system. Website says it also works on HFS+ besides Windows file systems. With the demo version, you can see what it can recover. Pay, and you can recover the files.

I can also vouch for the lifetime license. Bought the NTFS version a decade ago, and same license key allowed me to install and use their newest "all-in-one file system recovery" program.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

You use the computer OS to change them globally.