So, it seems to be true. It’s not a question of if a hard drive will fail, it’s a question of when. I am now in the unfortunate position of having first hand experience of this…
The other morning I tried to turn on my main image drive, a 10 month old Lacie d2. When it wouldn’t start up properly and starting making a horrible grinding noise I felt my heart climb into my mouth. It’s always a good idea to have some Disk Recovery software lying around but when a drive fails to even start spinning this is rendered pretty useless.
I’m usually pretty good at backing up my data but due to the large file sizes I only backup my PSD documents when a project has been finished. Needless to say, I have potentially lost a lot of my recent work, not to mention the time it will take me to re-do all the retouching. I don’t know if Disklabs will be able to recover any of my data yet (I’ll find out on Monday) but I do know that it will cost me over £400 if they can. This plus the 2 new 500GB drives that I have had to drop ££ on to satisfy my current data loss paranoia makes for a pretty expensive and avoidable mistake! What has also been quite scary is the majority of people I have told my tale of misfortune to have all admitted that they haven’t done a backup for a ‘while’ either.
Moving on to the point of this post. This has obviously got me thinking about a backup solution and what I can do to try and limit the chances of this happening again. First thing I think I’ll do is install a couple more 500GB SATA drives into my G5, one of which will be my main working drive. It seems that one of the problems that can arise with external drives is the lack of adequate cooling fans within the drive housing. So, knowing that the internal cooling of a G5 is pretty good, internal SATA drives are a safer way to go in my opinion.
I’m also going make sure I now keep an exact clone of my working drive at all times. For this I’m going to use SuperDuper, a great bit of software that allows you to do ‘Smart Updates’ of hard drives. A Smart Update will copy, erase and delete what’s needed to make your backup identical to your source drive. You can also schedule backups to happen at the same time every day. Perfect.
I am definitely also going to continue having Lightroom 2 backup my camera raw files to a second drive during the import process. This has really saved my arse on this occasion as I still have access to all my original raw files. If you use Lightroom and don’t use this option I obviously highly recommend it! Finally, I will probably carry on backing up older, completed projects to DVD. However, I suspect I should probably start burning a 2nd safety copy and storing it somewhere safe, just in case.
So. When was the last time you backed up your data?
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