Hard Drive Backup Experience
I had a four terabyte drive fail. I’m talking about hard drives and backing up data. The last month or last three or four weeks of content that I put specifically on that drive is gone without a backup, but it doesn’t affect my photos, which is excellent. That’s all on its built-out backup system that includes different hard drives. It does affect some audio work that I was recording, some video files, some media from my phone that I was transferring over to downloads. All that media is on a drive that I don’t think I can get it back.
It’s great that I can rebuild most of the data on a new drive.
It’s great that none of it was precious. It’s not great to lose it. It feels weird when a hard drive goes toast. If it’s your external hard drive, you think, well, I put it on the external. It’s not on my computer anymore. It must be backed up. I’ve just seen many people get in hot water. They can not get their data back because of some drive failure or operating system failure.
The arm on the hard drive got stuck up on the platters. I had to open it up with these, these hex screws. I open the top of the hard drive, and I see this arm. Then the other arm is this piece that comes out like the needle on a record player and lands an arm on the platter to read the data. There is the idea. Four platters are stacked on each other. Then this complicated arm system reads that data. Then it ended up getting stuck up on that arm as part of some firmware failure problem. I opened it up. I reset the arm back down. I still can’t read the data on the drive. It’s just making a weird scratchy sound now, which is worse.
Almost all the data on that four terabyte drive was backed up in a second location. So I’m able to rebuild and reconstruct the data that would have been on that drive.
It is common for photographers who manage media data to work with terabytes of data over the years. I did lose data. I am frustrated. I am glad that it’s not a mission-critical failure. I had audio samples that were downloaded for logic, pro x. Almost 80 gigabytes of audio samples that is a big file to download, now erased. I didn’t have those files backed up. No problem because I can redownload all those audio sample files off of the internet.
3-2-1 Backup – I must get a massive hard drive to make a full backup of this data. That drive stays current with software like super duper or Mac OS Time Machine. I keep the drive off to the side of my studio computer. If it exists once, it doesn’t exist. If it exists twice, you can count on the data existing only once. Photographers say to have your photo data exist in three places. You have a whole series of redundancies, where you have one that exists offsite, you have your data, you have a backup of that data that’s local, you have a backup of that data is duplicated locally. Then you have another triplicate of that in an offsite location that if something happens, you can get it back.
For offsite backups, people either have a hard drive that the image with all that information and leave it another house, or they have a hard drive of information that they have transferred over a data connection up to a cloud service where they can store all that information on a server, the least expensive way to do that is by using the Amazon photos, or glacier services.
It’s cold storage. It’s where the drive doesn’t spin up constantly. You can’t get to it right now. In 30 seconds, you can’t go to an Amazon page. You can with an S two box and get your data active. So it’s in a cold storage system that it’s been put on the internet, it’s on a disk, then now it’s no longer spun up and active. When you want the data back, you go to a portal. You select the Hey. I’m going to want to access this block of data. Make this active for me. Then in 24 hours, you’ll have access to that bucket of data out of cold storage. Now you can pull it down and get a copy of your data.
It is good To have a cloud drive that you think is an excellent offsite backup. It’s not always up to date. It’s not always a perfect copy of the images. It just breaks down into having a backup that is somewhere that will remain safe. Having a mix of all these things grouped is a great way to build a solid backup strategy. It’s inexpensive to store photo data in the cloud for an offsite backup solution. It’s also nice to have all my landscape photos backed up in a place where if I torch all my hard drives, I still do have that ten years of work that I put in.
Make an archive and buy hard drives. The drives are pretty cheap now. You can get eight terabytes. It’s $140 bucks. It’s great.
Hard Drive Backup Experience
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