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On Friday I transferred all the images from a trip to Thailand last week to my PC, had quick browse through them and everything looked fine, then had to go out before I got a chance to copy them to a separate physical drive as is my normal practice.

After getting back home later on, I noticed some odd disk activity on my comp. where normally there would be none, "hmm, strange" I thought, and went to bed. Saturday I went to do a batch conversion on these images to take to a friend's place and strangely all but the first few popped up with an error message "Invalid Format". Then my file manager locked up - to cut a long story short, I had just witnessed a hard drive with a two years worth of images on it going tits up!

Of course, they're all backed up on another HD, and on DVDs, and the Thailand images were still on my CF cards - so as you can see, this is why it is good to back up. Drives can fail at any time...

It was the newest of the four drives in my comp. too - I'll be going out on Monday and buying a couple of new ones I think!

Cheers

agreed. buying my WD 1TB ethernet backup drive was the best thing i ever did. it backs up "on the fly" so i dont have to do a single thing. its just all there no matter what happens.

the only downside of this is that it backs up everything straight away so there are going to be a shitload of shots on it that i've deleted at on my HD but will still be on the WD drive. yes i could click on "purge deleted files" but the whol idea of it to me is that it backs up not only HDD errors, but also user error.

I know what you mean....I use syncback to do my backups.....to a 1tb Seagate in a Vantec Dock.

It was the newest of the four drives in my comp. too

a timely reminder! always be wary of new drives and very very very old drives, anything in the middle should be OK. Glad to hear you did not lose anything..

aim54x wrote:syncback

Free and easy. That's the way to go.

Totally agree, I bought a brand new system this year and lost a disk in the first week. Lucily for me, I had specced a large RAID5 array so I didn't even have any downtime save for swapping out the disk. I also sync my array to an external drive that is in fact two mirrored disks, so it can survive one failure as well.

Don't forget off site backups as well, if the house burns down that external drive isn't much good. I've set up mozy from mozy.com a couple months back and signed up for the unlimited data option at $5 a month. Currently I have 220GB of data backed up with them - luckily for me my ISP doesn't meter uploads! Obviously in the event of a total failure I'm not going to pull all that back over the web, but I can get back key files and have my images burnt to DVDs and mailed to me when I am online again. It also gives me the ability to recover corrupt files that a local mirror just copies, and old versions if I edit something and stuff it up.

Money well spent given what I have spent on camera and PC gear, it's positively cheap!