Remember to backup!

Yes, it’s a subject that has been mentioned over and over again, this time I myself got close to the problem and I’d write something about what I do to prevent data loss.

Last week my computer started acting up, unresponsive, lag, CPU maxing out for no apparent reason. And after investigating the entire evening, I suddenly heard a clicking noise from my computer. So I opened the bugger and located the drive clicking. I pulled it out and booted the computer again, only to see that my drive containing all my images was gone.

Damn it!

I use Lightroom to import new images from my camera, and I’ve set it up so that when importing it also backs up to a network drive. Unfortunately I re-installed my PC (Yes and I’m running Vista – don’t haze me for it) in October and that setting had been left out. All my great images of my children, of my niece born in September and multiple other shots of family and friends was lost.

Okay, what to do?

I brought the hard disk to work and plugged it into another machine, I have software to recover lost files so I was hoping to do that. It was still clicking, also known as “The click of Death” in a hard drive. I googled for hard disk recovery companies and in my case (a hardware error) it would cost around $1500. But since it was mainly photographs of a sentimental value I would spend the weekend trying to do something about it, instead of paying $1500 to save my butt.

First by scanning my computer, nothing found.

Then by looking at my network drives, nothing.

Then by looking at my external SATA drive, but where was the power supply? Darn it, when shit hits the fan it really spreads. I had to remove the drive and put it inside the computer, the disk was empty. Oh perhaps there was some old stuff on it, so I started my Restorer (www.bitmart.net) and after about 6 hours of scanning the entire surface of my 250GB disc, I found nothing. At least no pictures, a lot of other old information but images – none.

Then yesterday (Saturday) I went to the local computer store to buy another HDD enclosure, and when I got home with this nifty HDD docking station where you just swap drive by putting them into the device. I started going through my drives and hey presto! There was the backup, I had actually copied my Lightroom catalog to this disc some months ago, and the missing files were there.

So what to do now?

Well a backup procedure has to be setup, and preferably some sort of automation. I spoke to a friend, and we talked about having a backup at each of our homes, I would backup to a drive at his place, and he would backup to a drive in my server. Now we just need to configure that.

But meanwhile this is what I do:

I work on my pictures locally – I have tried having all my pictures on a network drive, but I think it’s too slow to work with comfortably. I then make sure every time I import, new pictures are backed up to my server. The server has mirrored hard drives and that is also some sort of protection for faulty hard drives.

I also backup my Lightroom catalog files once a week, these files contain the modifications to individual files so I don’t need to process the pictures again.

And I also use my new HDD docking to backup everything once a while. It comes with software to copy or sync folders, at the press of a button.

Tags: Adobe Lightroom, backup, Bitmart, hard drive, Re-Install, Recover files, Restorer