k9moe Loc: Hornell, NY

Just wanted to let everyone know. I have been using a Seagate 3TB external hard drive to back up my pictures. Last week I went to retrieve some pictures and the hard drive failed. I have lost 154,753 pictures. I took the drive to the local PC expert and he said I will have to have the drive forensically examined to recover the pictures. I am now using the Cloud. Just wanted to share in case you are using a Seagate External Drive.

Picdude Loc: Ohio

I'm sorry to hear about your problem. Hopefully you can get your pictures retrieved without too huge of an expenditure. How old was the Seagate drive?

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

Seagates are not the only hard drive that will fail, pretty much ALL hard drives will fail after time.

Regardless of the brand, you can count on a hard drive failing at some point down the road, so make sure that you have redundant copies of your important data.

And definitely do not count on a manual procedure!

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

It sounds like you were NOT using the drive for backup. You were using it as primary storage. If it was backup, then you would still have the images on the working drive.

A backup is a second (or third or fourth) copy.

Zonker Loc: Leesburg, FL

Never depend on one B/U. I have three, a second hard drive, an external hard drive, and a 256GB flash drive. Even if you completely trust "the cloud" I would still have at least two local B/Us.

I hope they can recover them for you. If they do, it would be interesting to know cost.

Morning Star Loc: West coast, North of the 49th N.

It has been said many times, that it is not a matter of whether a hard drive will fail, but when. Which is the very reason I have my photos on my computer's hard drive (working copies), and those photos, including the edits, copied onto two external hard drives, one of which I keep at home, one at my son's place. These two external drives are updated regularly. They also were bought at different times and are different brandnames (WD & Seagate). I know it is still no guarantee, but I figured the chances are small that all three drives would fail at the same time.

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

Very sorry to hear about your lost pictures.

I am a little confused about your description of backup. The term usually refers to making a duplicate copy to prevent data loss in the event of some kind of failure like a disk going bad.

Did something else happen or was this disk your only copy of the pictures?

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

Cloud services also fail sometimes, unless you have a duplicate copy somewhere else you could still lose your data (pictures).

Gabriel Loc: North Providence, RI

Hi,
I know the feeling. As a professional videographer, I
keep master copies of everything I do. You might consider
"burning" all your most precious photo files on CDs, DVDs or better still on blu-ray discs. Certainly, also, with the cost of external drives so reasonable, it does make sense to have
copies on at least 2 drives. Thanks for the reality check...we
often go along in life thinking that nothing will break down.
I now have 2 editing computers (custom built) because
one never knows.
Good Luck, Gabriel (Gabe)

Mr PC Loc: Austin, TX

Computer guy here. I echo the sentiment on multiple backups on different types of media and cloud storage in case a major disaster like fire, flood, tornado, etc. wipes out your location. I've witnessed too many people that didn't take my advice lose "irreplaceable" files. They get religion about backups shortly thereafter. As consultants, we can only strongly suggest. Reality sometimes seems to be more convincing...

kapekodder Loc: A sandspit in the East😁

I empathize with your dilemma. After relying on external portable drives for file storage, I bought a Drobo about 3 years ago. My configuration includes 4 individual 4T drives and automatically downloads and backs up my photographic files from Lightroom. This is set to maintain 2 separate backup copies. Never a hiccup. With this system, the Drobo is supposed to warn of imminent drive failure before the failure affects the double backup program, allowing time to replace the failing drive with a new one. Can't complain and have confidence that my 90,000 files are and will be accessible, along with my Lightroom catalogues. Relatively inexpensive ($<500.) and very easy to set up, although it can take many hours for the Drobo to establish its initial storage copy. Other redundant systems are systems are available and are probably much less expensive than a forensic recovery (with questionable success). None of my original WD drives are showing signs of trouble. Peace of mind, IMHO. Good luck!

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

It's not the fact that it was a Seagate, or anything else brand-related. All the major drive manufacturers make at least 3-5 variants of their hard drives. Don't expect a 3TB drive that comes in a passively cooled case, that sells for around $100-150 to last. This stuff is junk - whether you buy WD, Seagate, Hitachi, etc.

The better solution is to spend the correct amount of money for a more robustly made enterprise-class drive, like a Seagate Constellation or a WD RE, or even the Black series - both of which have 5 yr warranties and are built for more abuse - and install the drive in a Rosewill enclosure - the one that is USB 3.0 and has active cooling (a fan). Such a setup may set you back $200 for a 2 TB drive, but it will last longer. Oh, and don't forget to get two - because you need to have backup.

If you supply these drives with clean AC power using a ZeroSurge protector which will NOT allow any harmful spikes to come through the power line, and a sine wave UPS, you will be in the best shape you can be as far as doing everything you can to prevent hardware failure. It's not a guarantee, but taking these steps will save your butt.

I will take weeks to upload your pictures to a cloud service, and wait and see what happens when you try to retrieve data - and god forbid the cloud service goes out of business.

Best strategy for data security is to manage it yourself - on multiple drives in multiple locations. And there is nothing stopping you from making your own personal cloud using a Synology drive enclosure and its software.

Edmund Dworakowski

I've backup all of my files, especially photos Offline using Carbonite. Unlimited space for my laptop and external drive for $90.00. I'm seriously thinking of a 2nd external drive, just in case !

RFC Loc: Tucson, Az

two months ago my company laptop crashed. I told them that I needed a lot of the files and asked them to send it in and see what they could recover. this happened just after they decided that the company back up was no longer needed. I was told that the recover cost 1500.00. they bought me a external hard drive. I also bought my own and now keep two copies. note most of the data and pictures were recovered, BUT not all

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

Nothing wrong with offsite cloud based storage for BACKUPS... as long as they remain backups.... if it becomes primary storage for your data then you have a problem should the storage company go belly up and your data is lost. No one cares much if BACKUP data is lost, as long as the data exists on primary or tertiary storage somewhere. :)

There have been plenty of comments on here from others where it was clear that what they saw as "backup files" was really the only copy of the data that they had. So it became a major problem when the "backup drive" was lost.