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.

Why are once in a lifetime photos only saved in one location?

I know that's a shitty answer, but honestly, there is no reason why this type of thing should be happening to anyone this day in age.

I think you should start by coming up with a legit backup plan. I mean no disrespect and I am not trying to be mean but 99% of us here (in the wedding forum) have suffered failures in one way or another with hard drives. Most of us backup our stuff 3-4 times and also in multiple locations.

I am assuming that is your only drive with those photos on it. If you do have backups somewhere then you are in better shape.
If not then I would be contacting some kind of hard drive recovery company. Unless something really really really drastic happened to the drive (magnetic erasing, fire, corrosion...) the recovery company should be able to pull something off of it.

The recovery places can get expensive especially if drive has a broken read/write armature or bad motor etc. Then they essentially have to take the drive apart in a special clean room and do a lot of other fancy stuff to recovery your data. Can it be done... most likely but you are going to be spending thousands of dollars if it is really really bad.

After you have sorted out the data on the drive you should most likely contact the Mac dealer and or LaCie to see if there is some kind of warranty. The warranty is not going to cover data recovery costs but they might give you a new drive if they are feeling generous.

Good luck

I haven't had a hard drive failure that wasn't a LaCie product. That was a very long time ago too, back when 60gb hard drives were a standard size and well before I started photography.

But under any and all circumstances, I never fail to have at least 2 copies of photos at any given time on separate hard drives. If there's a drive I feel unsure about or I have just installed fresh drives, I make a third duplicate on a trustworthy drive.

This was an easy-to-avoid problem. Maybe someone well-versed in hard drive repair or similar skills could help...

hardlyboring wrote:

99% of us here (in the wedding forum) have suffered failures in one way or another with hard drives.

I'm running about a 25% failure rate for hard drives. Over an eight-year time period, I've purchased around 20 hard drives and 5 of those have failed. (I've never used LaCie drives.)

I really hope you have another backup. If not; lesson learned the tough way. Hopefully you'll salvage it and prepare for the future.

Several years ago I lost four -- yes FOUR -- hard drives. One was completely unrecoverable, one was replaced right before it died, and the other two were recovered by Drive Savers, but not at a small cost. I am a PPA member so I benefitted greatly by their discount program with Drive Savers. Here's the lesson: it is FAR cheaper and tremendously less nerve-wracking to buy separate hard drive to duplicate your work than it is to fly solo with your backup. For another approximately $125 investment you would not have had to write this post.

I've had great success with LaCie; Western Digital, not so much. Regardless of the manufacturer, DRIVES WILL FAIL.

Hope you get your data recovered. Happy new year.

cbres00 wrote:

I've had great success with LaCie; Western Digital, not so much.

You know what drives I'm recently having real good luck with performance-wise? "Samsung" branded drives manufactured by Seagate (Barracuda). Giving me better read/write peformance than Western Digital! (Can't say one way or the other how the Seagate Samsungs are so far as longevity; I just got started on them within the past year.)

All drives will fail! Someday.
The best deal is to pick up a 3TB Seagate USB3 hard drive for around $120 from Costco and back it up on the internal HD and the external HD!

You do have to be diligent in doing this though.
I also have another 3TB external HD doing a time machine backup all the time on my Mac.

If you're using a MAC I'm assuming you're not using 'Time Machine' for regular multiple backups each time you're using the machine?

As already stated of course having at least 1 duplicate backup would have been the most appropriate solution to avoid such an emergency, but I always have at least 1 external hd drive plugged in to my MAC which is automatically backed up to via Time Machine. This means at the very least I have the hd drive of the MAC copied onto an external drive.

Hi, thank you all for leaving a comment and some advise. Yes, all of the wedding photos are backed up as well as uploaded to my SmugMug site, so all is not lost there. I should have stated that more clearly.

However, I did not upload every single photo on the drive and there are many more random but special photos that are only on this drive. I have six externals more or less full and running most of the time, starting with some over 10 years old, and none have ever been a problem before. So I became too used to them working. And this one did to, of course, until it didn't.

I will be bringing it into the store where I purchased it this week to see what can be done.

StowePhoto wrote:
Hi, thank you all for leaving a comment and some advise. Yes, all of the wedding photos are backed up as well as uploaded to my SmugMug site, so all is not lost there. I should have stated that more clearly.

However, I did not upload every single photo on the drive and there are many more random but special photos that are only on this drive. I have six externals more or less full and running most of the time, starting with some over 10 years old, and none have ever been a problem before. So I became too used to them working. And this one did to, of course, until it didn't.

I will be bringing it into the store where I purchased it this week to see what can be done.

I don't think the store is going to be able to help you... I'd get in touch with one of the drive recovery outfits listed earlier in this thread.

Same topic was in the Pro section. Check that out for a list of programs. I had HD's do the same and it as a partition issue which someone listed a program that could repair. The discussion is still on the main page.
http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1134944

I lose about 1 hard drive per year. Plan for the worst and hope for the best. While it might be overkill, I have 4 copies of every file. I have yet to lose any data with a hard drive loss.

Find a system that works for you and automate as much of it as you can. The biggest failure point of any backup plan is human interaction.

Spencer

I've used ESS recovery and Datacent recovery, both very good and reasonable. Google them.

I had a 250gb lacie rugged die recently, cracked it open and pulled out the hitachi drive inside. Once the bare hitachi was mounted onto my harddrive dock the hard drive worked fine. Turns out it was the Lacie hardware in between my computer and the hard drive that caused the problem.

I also have a 1TB Lacie that has not caused any problems yet but am considering pulling that hardrive out also before any issues start up.

Yes, I suggest taking the hard drive out of the Lacie box and see if it works on it's own.

1. Take apart the enclosure and try the physical drive in a USB dock bay or something.

2. If that doesnt work, there are any number of services out there that handle this exact kind of thing, but they are not cheap and the success rate is under 50%, or so I've heard.

3. For your client's sake- Get a real backup plan

In case you are wondering:
- When I get home from a shoot I import photos onto one of my MBPs SSDs.
- I then copy them to my Thunderbolt RAID array for archiving.

----At this point The images exist in four places- CF Card, SD Card, Laptop SSD, RAID array.

-I have my entire system backing up via Time machine on a crap ton of FW800 externals daisey chain raid 0 together. I do not reformat memory cards until my last shoot is backed up on my time Machine.
-Every month or so I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make clones of all my discs using a thunderbolt bay and normal cheap 3.5" HDDs to take offsite.
-When Im done with processing I put the images on Zenfolio for client delivery. They stay there as a final form of off-site backup, in the rare chance my office and my house both burn to the ground with my laptop inside.

The point is, at any given time, any image I have ever taken exists in no less than 3 places at once. I wouldn't be able to sleep if this wasn't the case.

Best of luck!

tl;dr

MattSepeta wrote:
- I have my entire system backing up via Time machine on a crap ton of FW800 externals daisey chain raid 0 together. I do not reformat memory cards until my last shoot is backed up on my time Machine.

You are aware, that Raid 0 (aka. striping) really loweres the reliability? Raid 0 is for speed only. Raid 1 is for reliability.

For people also backing up on dvd/blueray: there exists dvdisaster which enables to recover data even when the disk starts to fail.

For people not yet backing things up:

While shooting a wedding, I offload my spent cards onto a Nexto Di portrable back-up drive. $449.99 at BH Photo Video. My associate shooter (or my wife, depending on who's with me) does the same thing. We now have two copies of the images - one on the cards, and one on the back-up drive. I make sure to run a back-up and verify, so it not only backs up the images, but verifies the quality of them and makes sure there aren't any corrupt files.

Then when I get home, I set all of my cards on top of my desk in a nice neat pile (usually there's 2-3 of them, unless my wife shoots with me. Then it's 4-5). My second shooter has already taken his/her cards home, because I have their images backed up. They know not to delete those cards until all is well on my end. I plug in my Nexto Di back-up drive, and offload all of the images onto my computer.

After they're on my desktop, I begin importing into Lightroom. At the same time, I copy the files to my Raid 1 NAS Netgear system.

Once my images are on my computer, safely in my Raid system, and I already know they're on my portable drive and I have them in three places, then I format the cards.

After ALL the images are done being edited, the final images are saved on my harddrive (obviously), backed up to my Raid system, and then uploaded to SmugMug for safe keeping. Final images are accessible in two places by me, and online in one place.

My Netgear NAS system with 4 bays and 2 Toshiba 2TB hardrive ran me just under $1,000. My portable Nexto Di drive ran me $449.00.

Less than $1,500 to see all of my images, in their RAW and final versions, completely backed up and safe helps me sleep well at night.