How a hard drive failure changed the way I see and do my work.
File storage.
I know I’m guilty. I’ve been saving my files very irresponsibly for a photographer—One terabyte drive on my working machine and 3 terabytes of external backup. It may seem that this set up was plenty for the type of work I was getting but Oh Boy I was wrong. The story goes like this. I own a one terabyte iMac which needed desperately a hard drive update. The whole thing was full. I poorly could work Photoshop out of it and I needed a replacement fast.
My old set up
This was my set up for saving and archiving my files, 1 terabyte internal HD to save my RAW files (really) and 3 terabytes external to back up my computer. For me this was the perfect set up but then I started to shoot more and more and it got to the point where I needed to update.
The Problem
I moved all of my computer files to my trusted 3 years external HD (big mistake) at the time I didn’t really know that the lifespan of a hard drive is 2 to 3 years. Mine was due for disaster. After installing a fresh operating system copy and deleting my computers internal HD, the very next day my 3 terabyte back up dies. No previous warning. Now what?
The Solution… maybe.
I tried so many recovery softwares that took days to go over the 3 terabytes and gathered most of the files, YES… 90% of them were corrupted. Meaning I got garbage. Now what? I said, maybe this software is not the best approach for this particular case so I took the drive to a professional recovery company. After three days I got a call form the recovery company guy, Alex. “I’m sorry but there’s nothing I can do. It seems that the drive was wiped clean” meaning reformatted. “There’s nothing we can do about it but you can get a recovery program to gather your files” …Yes he suggested the same program I previously used. At the end I lost a great deal of work, from my graphic design days to a few events and portrait shoots I did. Luckily I didn’t lose a pending wedding I had shot the week before. Everything was saved on an external HD I was testing at the time for onsite flash card dumping.
I took some time researching and looking for a more responsible back up solution and this is what I got —A plethora of drives.
- I installed a second drive to my Imac (a solid state drive—a very fast little dude) where I run all of my programs and operating system from. This made my computer 4 times faster.
- I still have the old internal 1 terabyte drive which I used for non important things like browsers downloads and program catch files — that drive is only for mundane computer work.
- For my photography work I got an external SSD 128 GB drive where I save projects I’m currently working on. This gives me more control on keeping my file size down because of the drive limitation.
- This drive gets backed up automatically to a 8 terabyte RAID system. This system has four disks (2 TB each) in which they are paired in couples to create a 4 terabyte copy of each other. If one drive dies I can replace it and it will get all of its content back from the second pair automatically. Great stuff!
- Then that 8 TB drive gets uploaded to the cloud of unlimited storage which I can access from any place I get Internet connection.
So tell me, have you ever lost a photo, a song on that old computer that made you cry “WHY?”
Comment and share if you dig it.
Drives and Software I’m using now
Elite Pro Qx2 (for my RAID system)
One OWC Mercury Electra 3g SSDs 240 GB, for my internal (replacing the optical drive)
One OWC Mercury Electra 3g SSD 120 GB, as my working drive. with an external encase.
and finally a cloud folder in my FTP server.
All that automatically sync using GoodSync