Lossy Data

[mik3cap]

I recently had a nasty external hard drive failure - normally this wouldn't be an issue, as I'm good about making backups, but for some ridiculously stupid reason I only had one copy of my entire iPhoto library stored on this drive. I decided to go for having the data recovered, and found myself willing to pony up the serious money it would take to do it. The recovery place notified me today that the drive is 90% cloneable, but that there is a problem right at the start of the drive that they haven't been able to fix in the last three weeks, and without that one critical sector the entire thing is corrupted and unreadable. They are going to try one more time, and I'll know by the end of next week if they have succeeded.

At this point it is seriously looking like I am losing most everything I have done in pictures over the last 6 or 7 years.

It turns out though that I was at least good about putting decent resolution versions of my favorite pictures online, mainly here on LJ. So I don't think there will be a total loss... but I do find myself grieving about forever losing the highest resolution files, all my videos, and all the photos that I never did anything with that I was saving for a later date.

I have bought a Flickr pro account, and everything I have will be synced to it. When I reload everything into iPhoto again, I will also be backing it up on CD and 2 redundant external drives (with one rotating off site every month or so).

It always takes a catastrophe to make you realize what you have to lose!

Comments

[purly.livejournal.com]

Yeah, through my many years of various computers, my LJ has always been safe. I even made a hardcopy once, but my pictures aren't backed up.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

What really sucks is that I have no easy way to pull synced photos off my not-jailbroken iPhone. I have pictures on there that are literally the only copies I have left, and I have to email them to myself one at a time.

[kitteridge.livejournal.com]

I am sorry to hear that. Backing it up and STILL having problems.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

I really was my own fault for only keeping one copy of my photos. Three copies is my minimum for everything from now on!

[saintentreri.livejournal.com]

Jesus... I almost threw up thinking about that. I gotta get on top of my backups too. It just seems like the inexpensive stuff would fuck up and the expensive stuff is... well, too expensive. Not sure exactly how to proceed. Good luck, man.