Hard Drive Horror Stories

FormbyGirl

FormbyGirl

Sugar Cookie : GingerScraps Praise
Recently, one of our members posted about losing photos and kits after a hard drive crash. Do you have any horror stories about losing things on a hard drive or computer crash? What did you do to recover? Are you better at backing up now?

I don't have any terrible stores and am pretty good about backing up. I just do a HD to HD copy periodically. It is often enough that I won't lose tons of stuff. After a big event or special event I do it right away.
 
I am always afraid of losing things. I've lost some photos but mostly for specific events that somehow didn't get backed up or the SD card from the camera was damaged and I couldn't transfer to the computer.
Because of it, I tend to back up every few months. Now I have to also worry about space for all my daughter's photos & videos from her phone. She tends to take lots of videos and save everything. I am trying to get the dh on board with getting an external drive just for her photos. Since I am the one who backs everything up I am super aware of space. And I am also aware of how long it takes to download her photos from the phone, so I dont let it go long between backups.


I have been toying with the idea of having a backup of my photos on an external drive and keeping it at my parents house.
 
I've come close, but have been very lucky & have gotten very anal about backups. I have 2 ehds. I backup photos, scrap supplies to one and then back that one up to another. I also backup photos to Amazon Prime photos and have a backup that runs nightly with CrashPlan. I've scanned almost 100 boxes of my inlaws slides which I REALLY don't want to do again LOL but I would be heartbroken if I lost my own personal photos. Since I probably won't live long enough to get them all scrapped, I want to at least be able to look at them. :)
 
Did you know CrashPlan is transitioning to business only and will no longer be supporting home subscriptions. They are recommending you move to Carbonite. (https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/consumer/nextsteps/) I went to look them up after reading your post...

quilter said:
I've come close, but have been very lucky & have gotten very anal about backups. I have 2 ehds. I backup photos, scrap supplies to one and then back that one up to another. I also backup photos to Amazon Prime photos and have a backup that runs nightly with CrashPlan. I've scanned almost 100 boxes of my inlaws slides which I REALLY don't want to do again LOL but I would be heartbroken if I lost my own personal photos. Since I probably won't live long enough to get them all scrapped, I want to at least be able to look at them. :)
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Did you know CrashPlan is transitioning to business only and will no longer be supporting home subscriptions.
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I do, and I decided to stay with them. I tried Carbonite and discovered that they only keep deleted files for 30 days and then they are gone for good. I've had things that I've deleted accidentally and discovered it a long time later. After comparing for me the cost was worth it. I forgot to mention my "art gallery" of scrapping supplies, don't want to risk those either. This is going to sound crazy I know, but they are based in Minnesota and somehow it gives me comfort knowing my files are being taken care of here. While I've only had to use customer service twice, they are also based in Minnesota and I had a terrific experience.
 
I am a bit neurotic about backing up. DH is fantastic at looking after my laptop stuff but after I had a crash some years back, and his spending days and days recovering everything for me he said not again! I have several EHD's and make sure I have at least 2 copies of everything!
 
I lost three external hard drives within a few months of each other. I have the things I can't live without on flash drives now, but I would lose so much if my computer failed. Eeek!
 
I lost 3 years of our lives in a hard drive crash - and no, nothing was backed up. Now I have my computer and two hard drives that I back up to, and Michael has a full photo library on HIS computer and a back up set up as well. I *hope* this will never happen to anyone again. It's heartbreaking. Those were the last years of my Dad's life as well that got lost. :(
 
I lost three external hard drives within a few months of each other. I have the things I can't live without on flash drives now, but I would lose so much if my computer failed. Eeek!
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@LynnZant.....have you done a backup today?
 
Pachimac said:
I lost 3 years of our lives in a hard drive crash - and no, nothing was backed up. Now I have my computer and two hard drives that I back up to, and Michael has a full photo library on HIS computer and a back up set up as well. I *hope* this will never happen to anyone again. It's heartbreaking. Those were the last years of my Dad's life as well that got lost. :(
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Ugh, I'm so sorry about your photos. This IS heartbreaking.

I'm lax about my supplies but freaky about photos. They are on my computer, CDs/flashdrives, at Snapfish, and printed! And, I'm thinking about saving them to another flash drive in case there is something wrong with the one that I'm using.
 
FormbyGirl said:
Recently, one of our members posted about losing photos and kits after a hard drive crash. Do you have any horror stories about losing things on a hard drive or computer crash? What did you do to recover? Are you better at backing up now?

I don't have any terrible stores and am pretty good about backing up. I just do a HD to HD copy periodically. It is often enough that I won't lose tons of stuff. After a big event or special event I do it right away.
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Hmmm, I might know of this "member" :)
 
That said.... I did some major backing up last night! I reorganized my 2 EHD and desktop computer.
Now all three have the same format in terms of organization. I basically organized my day to day HD and copied everything over to the back up and the desktop.

I plan on having a folder for each current month and backing up every month.

I also plan on getting another EHD, the backup I currently have is only 1TB, almost full!

I used to be really good about backing up to Shutterfly, but I haven't in years. I think I'll start it again now...

I really love how they send "2 years ago, etc.." memories!
 
I have had 2 incidents.
One, a long time ago, we went to Yosemite and I took an older camera down the river and my son (and others) jumped from the bridge for the first time - kind of a rite of passage. Anyway, got back to camp to check the photos and the camera had a glitch and they were all gone! When I got home, I bought an external SD reader and a software program that was supposed to try to read it. It got back about 95% of the photos from it.

Second, more recently, I was using 2 ehds for kits and photos that are not currently in use. One of the ehds was more archived kits. It was wifi, so a pain to move stuff to and from, so I didn't use it very often. When I discovered that it would no longer activate, I haven't tried all that hard to recover its data. I figure if I don't even know what kits are there, they probably aren't that important. At the same time, my main ehd also died. I use Backblaze to backup and discovered that it wasn't backing everything up. I learned some things about backuping. Double back up is great. Just order the $100 ehd and don't try to take a short cut to recover the data. (They will refund the month if you return the ehd after you are done). It took forever to get my data and I did get almost all of it. Now, I am better about double checking that all is hooked up to get constant backups
 
In 2006 we had a family reunion at Bear Lake. I had purchased a SD card hard drive so I could put all photos on the drive. I had a laptop but it did not have much memory. I had a few photos on the laptop and some still on my card from the reunion but later found out the new card hard drive crashed. I was willing to pay $1000 to get the information but when I sent the drive in they said they could not retrieve any information and everything on it was lost. At least I still had a few on the laptop and card. I now back up to at least two EHD's before deleting. I do not store on the main computer hard drive because they are not large enough. I also gave each of my children there own hard drive with their family photos on that I back up for them often. I also keep each year on USB drives. I do not want to lose photos again. I am not as good about scrapping kits but periodically back them up to a second hard drive.
 
We had a computer crash about a year after we were married (long before I started scrapping and before I knew better). We lost almost everythings from while we were dating, everything from our honeymoon, and first year. It was devastating. We occasionally baked things up onto CDs after that or had it on multiple computers. It wasn't until I started scrapbooking that I looked into online backup and went with backblaze. Best $5/mo we could spend imo.
 
I used to be really good about backing up to Shutterfly, but I haven't in years. I think I'll start it again now...
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Keep in mind that Shutterfly doesn't store them at full resolution, I don't know if that's a big deal to you or not.
 
Funny this thread should come up, I'm researching online backups now! My school offers an account with Microsoft for Microsoft 365 which comes with a cloud account, so in the short term and storing everything there, that way I can access no matter which computer I'm using. Not sure that is a good long-term solution, but it is working for now.
 
Anything is better than nothing, right :) There is a saying "Only brush the teeth you want to keep!" I think it is the same with data - only backup the data you want to keep :)


kimb said:
Funny this thread should come up, I'm researching online backups now! My school offers an account with Microsoft for Microsoft 365 which comes with a cloud account, so in the short term and storing everything there, that way I can access no matter which computer I'm using. Not sure that is a good long-term solution, but it is working for now.
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True. The unfortunately thing is my husband doesn't quite see the importance of a backup system so paying for anything extra causes a lot of grief LOL. I also try to keep my stuff on both the external hard drive and my "big" laptop - which does back up to another laptop, but that one doesn't have a ton of storage available so I have to be picky about what is backed up. It's awesome having a teenager who wants to go into IT in the house, he does tons of research and sets everything up for me.
FormbyGirl said:
Anything is better than nothing, right :) There is a saying "Only brush the teeth you want to keep!" I think it is the same with data - only backup the data you want to keep :)
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I use Backblaze to backup my EHD which has my photos and all scrapping kits. I also use an app called Shoebox for my photos...because these are the most important to me and all I have to do is remember to launch the app and it automatically uploads all the recent photos I took or saved to my phone. There is also a desktop app that I can download them and use them when I'm scrapping...makes it so convenient when I'm looking for photos for a page.
 
CindyB said:
I use Backblaze to backup my EHD which has my photos and all scrapping kits. I also use an app called Shoebox for my photos...because these are the most important to me and all I have to do is remember to launch the app and it automatically uploads all the recent photos I took or saved to my phone. There is also a desktop app that I can download them and use them when I'm scrapping...makes it so convenient when I'm looking for photos for a page.
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Cool! I just looked it up... it's free! But do you know if it saves the pictures at full resolution? thanks!
 
The free plan keeps them at a resolution of up to 10.6 megapixels (3264 pixels on the longest side)...which has always been plenty big enough for me for scrapping. They have a pro plan too, which costs $48/yr, but I think you have more options to save at higher resolutions.
 
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