Seagate Hard Drive & Great Customer Support

We always seem to hear the bad, but today I have great news. When I backed up my Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and San Diego pictures a year ago, I figured they were secure. When I reconfigured my Photoshop Elements folders and was setting up my Lightroom files, for some reason, the Grand Canyon and the rest of our beautiful western trip were not restored, for some reason.

Today I called Seagate technical support and he walked me through some things I didn't know about the Sseagate 1 TB external hard drive, and presto, all of my supposed lost files were recovered. The support specialist was very efficient, polite, and knowledgable. In all, I'd say I would be very comfortable dealing with Seagate in the future.

In all, I now have 9000 photos to wade through, and I think 1 or 2 should be decent enough to post. They were, unfortunately shot as jpeg, and with my D5100, but there are some very nice pictures including the seals laying on the rocks in LaJolla. Last year at this time, we were driving to El Paso to see our son and daughter-in-law. We saw our son being deployed to Afghanistan, and were there for the birth of our grandson, Gavin, in May, about 3 weeks after our son was sent overseas.

Anyway, there were some great pictures, and I'm glad I backed them up with Seagate.

Nice to know that you recovered your pics. But I guess it does not have much to do with Seagate or any other brand as well - it's more like messing with the Elements' config (as reported by many users, there are some bugs regarding pre-defined folders etc.). Remember one thing: the best kind of backup is the one made "manually" (user defined), and placed on the dedicated HDD (used for that purpose only). Dedicate the entire HDD of, say 2TB-4TB to the ORIGINAL photos (whether they are jpgs or RAWs) and you will never have to worry about them)...
Another thing: there are so-called "cloud storage services" many of which are free of charge (e.g. "mega.co.nz"). Compress your most important pics (use password protection) and upload them there too...

This is one of the reasons that I use the OS for backing up and copying. With any OS you are sure of what is being copied and where. Later on you can configure the backup in your Software.

Regarding Seagate, they have had a patchy time. Ten years ago it was only Seagate, then their 1 & 2 TB drives started having problems and WD took their place. Now Seagate is again clawing back.

I would never use "Cloud Storage" as an exclusive storage. The reasons are following
. Though cloud may be free the internet bandwidth is not. It is definitely cheaper to have a 1TB drive than 1TB cloud storage (and at least till date faster too).
. The company may wind up, and with that all your data.
. The data may be compromised and/or stolen. I will never trust confidential stuff to third party.
. Finally there are many parts of the world where the net is either non existent or at the best slow. Getting your data will be a problem.

The best way to preserve your images is
. Copy one set to your computer straight from the camera.
. Copy another set to an external USB disk. I use 500GB external dives. Plan to move to 1TB.
. The program I use (Nikon View NX-D beta) does non destructive edits. All edits are stored in a sub directory in a file with same prefix as the original in a modified XML format. All I need to preserve the edits is to copy the sub directory containing these files to the archived disk.
. I also keep a copy of all the jpeg files I generate, at a separate location.