PSA on backups

Clovishound

Senior Member
Yes, we all know we need to backup our important files. I'll do that next week.

Clovispup had her laptop die on her yesterday. She had bought a large capacity thumbdrive recently and was planning on backing up her photos soon. We have be very busy the last several weeks with a family issue. Most of her photos from the last several months of shooting were on the hard drive of her computer without any other copies. Took it to some techs, and they are confident they will be able to retrieve her data. We'll know later today or tomorrow whether they can.

Don't wait until the drive crashes to think about multiple device storage.
 

Dawg Pics

Senior Member
Yes, it is critical for digital these days.
A friend of mine had all of her kid's images on a laptop that died. She lost all of it.

I back everything up to a cloud service, and I am currently purging crappy images (lots of them). I am moving stuff I want to keep onto an external drive, but thinking about using Time Machine onto another external drive. I can grab the externals and throw them into a bag if I need to leave quickly.

Actually, most of the stuff I am keeping can probably go to. :rolleyes:
 

Eduard

Super Mod
Staff member
Super Mod
Yes, we all know we need to backup our important files. I'll do that next week.

Clovispup had her laptop die on her yesterday. She had bought a large capacity thumbdrive recently and was planning on backing up her photos soon. We have be very busy the last several weeks with a family issue. Most of her photos from the last several months of shooting were on the hard drive of her computer without any other copies. Took it to some techs, and they are confident they will be able to retrieve her data. We'll know later today or tomorrow whether they can.

Don't wait until the drive crashes to think about multiple device storage.

Always good to remind folks. FWIW, check out this old thread circa 2014 regarding backups. This approach has stood the test of time.

https://nikonites.com/computers-and-software/20172-new-year-resolution-improve-backups.html
 

Clovishound

Senior Member
Well, good news and bad news. Turns out the hard drive in her computer was pretty much toast, no pictures recovered. The good news is that she found a number of thumb drives that had some of her work on it. She hasn't gotten Lightroom loaded yet to see what may have been on their cloud. Fingers crossed. I have a folder with some of her better stuff on my computer as well. Not comprehensive, but again, not a total loss.
 

Clovishound

Senior Member
I suppose pre pc age there was an advantage where all photos were either prints or slides :)

Yes, but you needed to keep track of those darn negatives. I have boxes of well organized B&W negatives in my old darkroom. I also have boxes of not so well organized negatives there. All in all, I prefer the portable hard drive that contains thousands and thousands of images, over boxes that contain hundreds.

I have a notebook with hundreds of 645 B&W negatives from the time I took all the photos of my Air Force Reserve Squadron members for a "yearbook". (One of my extra duties was photographer for the squadron.) I can't bring myself to throw them out, but I doubt anyone is going to want all those photos from 30 years ago. Especially when there are the yearbooks floating around with all the pictures in them.
 

Sandpatch

Senior Member
... I back everything up to a cloud service, and I am currently purging crappy images (lots of them). ...

One thing I wish I'd realized sooner is to NOT delete a DSC file after editing it. When I bought my D5100, I'd edit my best DSC files to produce final jpg pictures, then I'd delete the DSC files. This was a mistake. Two years into ownership, I realized that my photo editing skills were improving and I couldn't start from scratch to re-edit my previous pictures. :(

Wiser, I began to keep my best DSC files so that I could always go back.

I've never been one to keep everything I shoot. I retain only my best DSCs and the jpgs I make from them. No regrets with that in ten years of digital photography.
 

hark

Administrator
Staff member
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BF Hammer

Senior Member
Just the other day this ad showed up on Facebook claiming their device retrieves files. Has anyone ever used it or something similar? It's called Little Triangle Pro Converter.



https://www.little-triangle.com/col...Sfrr4RpP2-Nzoq52DdFgqE1eVd1til96w7iC0lYetSQ6k

It is simply a USB interface for the different internal HDD formats from the past 30 years. Kind of expensive too. I have had a similar device for 10 years. It is a quick way to access a HDD that has been removed from a computer. It is not going to recover files from a drive that has failed, it can only read a working HDD.

So you use that for a temporary connection to read some files, or more as I used mine as a way to clone an old HDD on to a replacement SSD (solid state drive). There are HDD enclosures with a USB connection that will turn a working internal HDD into an external plug-in USB HDD. That can be used for backing up files to and is not so messy with exposed electronics.
 
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BF Hammer

Senior Member
@480sparky Nobody talks about how to do a restore. I guess I should look that up.

It can be as simple as copying a file from one folder to another depending on how you do your backups.

Right now I have software that will clone files of designated folders (I primarily just back up data and not software) from the SSD I use now on to the HDD that used to be my PC's main storage. It happens on a scheduled basis in the background when the PC is on.

It's not like the very old days when HDD's were super expensive, and you had to use special tapes in a drive for backing up files. You needed special software that wrote to tape for hours, and there was some file compression, and the backup would often span many tapes if you wanted to save everything. Then the restore required the same software to find the files and copy back to the original location. I was much happier when CD-RW was finally available to consumers.
 

480sparky

Senior Member
Some backup apps don't just copy files 1:1 from one drive to another. They compact the data into one huge single file, thus making restorations a bit more tricky.
 

Clovishound

Senior Member
I thought about getting an inexpensive drive enclosure for her drive. They told me that when they tried retrieving files it would crash after a while. I thought with a little patience we could copy some files before it crashed and maybe eventually recover everything we wanted. I talked with the guy when I picked it up, and he said it would crash every time they tried to access either documents or pictures. For $10 - $15 I may give it a shot anyway.
 

Dawg Pics

Senior Member
I have Crashplan, but they changed their plans. @Eduard How do you test a restore?

I need to consolidate. I have files on 3 computers that I am purging, but at least most of it is being backed-up. I want to say my oldest version of Apple isn't supported any longer. I guess I could just transfer images to the computer that is being backed-up regularly.

Don't some of the cloud back-ups have the capability of backing up an external drive or no?
 
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