Yep, that's a topic that has been mentioned again and again, this time I got the problem himself a little too close and I will write something about what I do to prevent data loss.

Last week, my computer began to cause problems, was slow to react, slow when you tried something, the CPU was 100% without any reason. And after having studied it all night, I suddenly heard a clicking sound from my computer. So I opened the machine and located the hard drive that clicked, I pulled the drive and rebooted the computer again. Just to see that my drive that contains all my pictures were gone.

Cursed!

I use Lightroom to import new photos from my camera and I have set it up so when I import pictures makes a backup to a network drive. Unfortunately, I re-installed my PC (Yes, I'm running Vista) in October and I had not got it set up to do it again. All my cool pictures of my kids, my niece who was born in September and several other pictures of family and friends were lost.

What do you do?

I took the hard drive with at work and connected it to another machine, I bought some years ago, some software to recover lost files, so I was hoping to do it. But it still clicked, the error is also called "The Click of Death". I searched for companies who could help me to restore data on my hard drive, but in my case (a hardware error), it would cost about $ 1500. Since it was mainly photographs of sentimental value, I would spend the weekend seeing if there was anything I could do, rather than pay $ 1500 to save my ass.

First I scanned my computer through the pictures, nothing found.

So I looked at my network drive, nothing.

So I grabbed hold of my external SATA drive, but I could not find the power supply. Honestly, when something goes wrong, everything goes wrong. I had to remove the drive from the external enclosure and mount it in your computer, it was a blank disc. Maybe there was some old stuff, so I started my Restorer (www.bitmart.net) and after approx. 6 hours it had scanned the entire surface of a 250GB disk. Without luck, there was a lot of old stuff - but no pictures.

So yesterday (Saturday) I went down to the local computer store to buy another hard drive enclosure, and then I came home with a nifty hard drive docking station where you can just change the SATA hard drives. So I started going through my hard drives, and Hey! - There was a backup I had made some months ago, and the missing pictures.

So what now?

One must suppose rather make a backup procedure, and preferably with some form of automation. I chatted with a friend about the problem and we found out that we'll be sure to make some kind of mirroring back to each other. He gets a hard drive installed in my server and I get a hard drive installed in his server. So, it just configured.

But in the meantime this is what I do:

The images stored locally on the machine when I work with them, I have tried to have them on a network drive. But it is too slow to work in a pleasant way. I make sure that every time I import pictures, they are simultaneously copied to my server. My server has mirrored hard drives, it is probably also a kind of protection against defective hard drives.

I also make sure to backup my Lightroom catalog files once a week. These files contain the changes to my pictures so I do not need to process the images again.

And then I use my new hard drive docking station to make a backup once in a while. It came with software to copy or synchronize folders just by pressing a button.