My worst nightmare.... Are my photos all gone?

in #tech5 years ago


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I plugged my external HD into my laptop today to load my Sydney photos into Lightroom for my next travel blog. And nothing happened. I did it again... and still nothing. Not even the power! My brand new external 4TB HD that I had been taking with me on all my trips said "Nope!".

Just because it was this large (4TB) and brand new, I had been copying all my stuff on that drive to turn it into my main backup drive. Only fragments of all the files I would send to the cloud each time thinking I would do that later when I had more time.

And now it just doesn't do anything anymore. The "helpful" guys make it sound so easy to fix but at times like this, I feel very much like a girl. Opening the case myself? And just put a SATA connector to it? It's like drilling holes in my wall, fear of failure is massive!

So fingers crossed I get over my fear and am lucky enough to fix the HD and reach my photos. Or else my next travel updates will become pretty lame ones without any new photos.

I ask you, photographers, what do you use for storage/backup to not get in my situation? What is your backup strategy and setup? I don't want to go through this ever again!

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What kind of HDD is it?

I had a friend who bought one a few years back that in reality had way less space in them than they marketed. On purpose had functions to allow transfer of files and bypass the limit only to later find out it hadn't saved them.

I hope this is not the case with your HDD.

Seagate Backup Plus 4TB. It's either a power disconnect or a faulty firmware thing.

Ah okay, not the one he had purchased.

Thankfully, no... He must have been so angry! What a shit move of that company!

Yeah, he was moving + had purchased a new phone so he put everything on there :<

If he was american I bet he could've sued them. :D

Oh yeah, my phone also always forgets to mention that it's now so full it didn't store my photos :D

Oh.. I usually keep different copies of my files: All new files stay on my internal hard drive at least until I have backed them up to the cloud (Amazon Photos offers unlimited free Raw storage for prime customers), a copy of all photos goes to my external HDD and I have 4SD cards with a total of 128gb that last me for some weeks without overwriting. At home I make a copy to a second hard drive. Despite that, I had data loss once when my laptop broke, my HDD stopped working, the SD card was corrupted and I didn't have fast internet to make a full cloud backup! Luckily I was able to restore some data from the SD card at first and when I got home from my trip I was actually able to fix the HDD - for some reason it made any windows computer freeze when plugged in but was still accessible from Unix systems.

Not sure how it connects; but have you tried using different cable? or changing usb port... that can sometimes help.
Be sure to try it on another device too :)

Yes, tried different cable, different ports, different devices and checked that everything worked with other drives.

Ouch! Good luck with the fix. I backup to two external hard drives and to a cloud storage service called CrashPlan. CrashPlan is constantly backing up files in the background and I don't notice it slowing things down. Although I haven't had to use it, I do often use it to find really old photos instead of searching through many old hard drives, some of the drives are over 10 years old...

Bring it in to a computer repair shop/digital forensics lab and see if they can bring it back to life long enough to transfer the data. Opening it may have made that harder or easier for them... not sure! Good luck.

problem is that the shop that I trust most with this would charge 799 euro for that... Sort of fixed price for complicated or easy cases... just so you know what the price will be. #ripoff

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praying to all the gods that nothing happens. not a great strategy i know. RAID is probably the best way to go but 100 Eur for a disk in Serbia well not that great.
I once had a HDD failure, long time ago (it was 80GB drive :) ) and it was my fault. It was - a lot and i was carrying it with me in my front jacked pocked, got in and plugged it. condensation an electrics not doing so well together.
Good thing is that most probably the electronics died and not the disk is dead. It should not be that hard of a fix for people that do that as a job. try finding someone that is not charging 700 eur for something like that.

Just wanted to give my moral support - don't have practical advice beyond what you've already received, but I sure do hope for a full recovery. :(

Oh no!!!! If its brand new, there still should be some sort of warranty on it?

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