1TB Lacie External Hard Drive has failed, so many wedding photos on it :((

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1TB Lacie External Hard Drive has failed, so many wedding...

morganb4
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p.2 #1 · 1TB Lacie External Hard Drive has failed, so many wedding photos on it :((

StowePhoto wrote:
I also posted this in general gear talk, but 99% of the photos on the drive are this past years weddings that I shot. I cannot afford to lose the photos for ever as I was basing this coming years marketing off of many of the photos on the drive. Plus there are a bunch of other sentimental photos on the drive as well.

The Message I write on general gear talk:

One moment my 1TB Lacie External Hard Drive is running fine. I eject it from the laptop, travel some, return a few days later and plug it back in and it does not register. Try again, reboot a bunch, restart, finally run Disc Utility (I'm on a Mac) and it comes back with the message of 'your disc drive cannot be repaired, make an attempt to salvage anything you can, then reformat the disc'

Oh, shit. There are important photos on there. Really, really important photos. People's once in a lifetime wedding photos. Extremely important personal photos. This is the first time this has ever happened, so I'm not sure where to turn. I bought the drive from a reputable Mac dealer, that has service department. Should I start there?

Thanks for any help...and massively hoping all is not lost.

Go and by a copy of disc warrior. It may work for you. Did for me. Incidentally, what file system was the external drive?

Another option is to just shelf the drive until a tool becomes available. I did this with a shafted 1TB RAID 0 array that had personal stuff on it that I thought was backed up but wasn't. Some time later I found out about Zero Assumption recovery which rebuilt the data for me - got every single thing back. Unfortunately ZAR doesn't work for HPFS yet.

Jan 02, 2013 at 11:16 PM

cabinajm
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p.2 #2 · 1TB Lacie External Hard Drive has failed, so many wedding photos on it :((

Here's my set-up at home:
Synology 1511+ with 3 disks (going to buy two more) set up in a RAID 5 configuration, and then backed up to a 1TB eSATA drive. I have data parity should one drive go bad, plus I have backups of everything on the 1TB drive. Make sure you have an UPS as well, don't want a power outage to kill your drives.

Jan 04, 2013 at 06:14 PM

DblDrgn
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p.2 #3 · 1TB Lacie External Hard Drive has failed, so many wedding photos on it :((

+1 on the UPS

Here's my simple setup for redundancy...

1) after a gig, I dump RAW files to an external 6tb "Lacie 2big quadra", it's set up to be raid1 meaning that there is 3tb of storage with 3 tb of cloned info (automatically clones everything to a second drive)

2) once per month I use carbon copy cloner to make another copy for offsite storage, on a cheap 3tb drive from WD

3) finished jpg files eventually end up on zenfolio, and stay there just in case the system above ever fails

Jan 08, 2013 at 02:35 PM

DavidCZ
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p.2 #4 · 1TB Lacie External Hard Drive has failed, so many wedding photos on it :((

Get some professional repair service and your files might be saved.

Lesson learned: Keep at least two backups. Nothing lasts forever. Hard drive will fail sooner or later. Years ago Seagate came up with Seashell technology, which supposes to protect the drive and the drive lasted a lot longer. It was slightly more expensive than regular drives. Guess what, the Seashell drive broke in 10 days.

I also used Raid back up system before. Guess what? It was gone two years later.

The bottom line: you had better have a multiple backup scheme.

Jan 08, 2013 at 06:19 PM

sozypozy
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p.2 #5 · 1TB Lacie External Hard Drive has failed, so many wedding photos on it :((

Try going to a professional and see if they can recover the files.

Jan 08, 2013 at 08:36 PM

paparazzinick
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p.2 #6 · 1TB Lacie External Hard Drive has failed, so many wedding photos on it :((

OK so I am going to be mean at first.... Why the hell do you only have 1 backup of important stuff? This is the most common and biggest mistake I see with every new photographer. THEY DONT PROPERLY BACKUP!!!

OK... now that is out of the way.

I'm sorry you are going through this. I have been in your shoes before, but it was in college and I lost a few papers I had to turn in for my finals in 48 hours. Guess who drank 2 cases of redbull and got them rewritten? YEP.... Since that happened to me, I started having 2 backups at all times of anything remotely important.

Then when I started my business I added a 3rd offsite backup. Here is what we do.

1. Main computer internal drive is backed up on time machine. If the internal drive fails then we can restore it in about 2 hours or so. No big deal. If the computer and time machine fail. O well it is only the OS and apps on there anyways.

2. Drobo #1 holds all of our photos and important files. If a drive fails, and it has, we pop it out and throw a new one in. Nothing lost.

3. Drobo #2 gets plugged in daily and mirrors what was added to drobo #1. If we did not do anything then we obviously dont plug it in.

4. Drobo #3 gets stored off site and comes home once every week to make an exact copy of one of the other drobos.

5. We also have a finalized copy of every photo shoot in JPG on zenfolio too. SO if PGH blows up and I lose all 3 DROBOs then I have final files somewhere

Now I am really anal about the data and for some odd reason I think if you dont use a file for a long time it will go bad. You know like a DVD or CD going bad. HAHAHA I doubt that would ever happen but hey I am weird about my backups. SO every year we totally wipe 1 Drobo and recopy everything from another drobo back on it. That way every single file that is on the drobo has been moved and or copied at least once each year. SO a 2004 file that isnt ever opened in a few years, gets copied each year. Make sense

MY OCDness

I also take it a step further. Every 3 years, the oldest drives get scrapped for new drives. Unless they already died and were replaced within that time. Last week I got 5, 3tb drives for $120 a piece. Threw them all in drobo #3. Next year drobo #1 gets new drives.

Jan 09, 2013 at 02:21 AM

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