onepictureatatime Loc: St. Louis, Missouri

I really did it this time. Many times I thought I had lost my entire photo collection, for one reason or another. (I am not at all comfortable with 'THE CLOUD'.) I back up my files to another drive on a regular basis.
I have been running on a MAC Pro laptop for about 3 years now and keep up with latest system updates, currently running 10.14.4.

I HAD 1.9TB of photos on a 6TB external USB drive, with a 6TB B/U drive.
Last week I walked away one evening, came back a few minutes later to a BLANK drive. No worry, I had my b/u drive to goto. 2 days later, almost the same exact thing happen. Now I am dead in the water.
To make a long story short, I have changed all cables and power supplies. My son took the primary drive home and it came up and worked fine on DOS pc.

I have used that drive on my MAC for several years, but now it does not see it all of a sudden.

HELP..I am looking for any and all ideas that anyone may be able to think of..PLEASE.

I have over 30000 photos at stake here.

I thank you very much for your time and effort on my part.
Have a good day,
Tim Kuelker
kuelkertim@gmail.com

therwol Loc: USA

Can your son see the photos on his PC?

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

Is the drive itself now empty or your machine cannot see it? If it is your machine cannot see it than you have a corrupted section in your OS or the connections on the motherboard may be going bad.


I will say that you need all the photos on at least two drives.
I have a 'P' drive in my desktop that is all photos and videos plus an external drive with complete system backup done daily, I keep one week's worth on the external and have another external I am going to put a third copy on as soon as I clean the room and rearrange the desks and tables.

Guyserman Loc: Benton, AR

Don't use either drive until you have called a computer professional. He should be able to repair the file allocation table and recover most of the files.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Does someone else have an Apple to which you can attach the external drive and check it?

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

That is the key question... if he can, copy the files to his HD ASAP (without bringing down the drive or turning it off for any reason) and then make a backup copy.

If this succeeds, you/we can diagnose the Mac problem later (and rethink your fear of the cloud).

Good luck - fingers crossed for you.

johnst1001a Loc: West Chester, Ohio

Does the computer see anything on the drives. is it possible your usb port is bad? I have one port on my MAC laptop that is bad. mine has two, so try plugging in to the other one. also you can take the computer to the Apple store if you have one, the can run a diagnostic test. Take one of the drives with you.

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

That is why I use BackBlaze.

ELNikkor

From the start, I've used 2 different technologies to save my photos; the spinning external hard drives, and the solid state flash drives. Along the way, I have lost files in one or the other, but have always been immediately able to replace them with the other. In your case, I'm sure the photos are recoverable, just have to find them.

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

Please respond to the questions below so we don't need to speculate in the wrong direction.
Otherwise all is silly jabber from here.

ggab Loc: ?

crazydaddio Loc: Toronto Ontario Canada

If son can see the files, copy them to his local drive and proceed to diag from there.

There is good advice in other threads if you poke around that talk about backup strategies.
You should always consider having a backup drive that is offsite. (Not physically in your house(theft/fire) and not attached to your computer (virus).
I do this once a year (I know should be much more regular), by taking a backup drive to my moms house when I visit each year and stick it in the closet.

traderjohn Loc: New York City

He has included his e-mail address. Maybe that would be the way to go.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

As a result of this post, I am now backing up to my NAS and two external drives. Thanks for the reminder.

hammond

Not comfortable? Are you comfortable with losing all your pics?

While I might not rely solely on cloud based storage, if you really care about never losing all your images, redundant backups would be wise, and the Cloud protects you against anything that could happen to your physical drives.

Or is this a privacy thing?

Just curious. Anti-Cloud mentality somehow reminds me of anti-vax: even though the benefits far outweigh the risks, unfounded fear stops so many people from making the smart and safe choice.