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Lesson #1. Always, always, always make immediate back ups of your images to other digital sources. (SD cards, flash drives, compact discs, external hard drive) NEVER trust them to your computer. Even if it's just family photos.
Today & rather suddenly, the hard drive on my laptop died. If I hadn't followed "Lesson #1" I would have lost every picture I've taken in the past 4 months. I only lost edited versions of my photos. It might take a little extra time, but well worth it.
OMG! Sorry about your hard drive. I would be devastated if my laptop hard drive crashed (would be costly to replace). Thank god for an external Western Digital hard drive and "Time Machine" on my MAC.
Lesson #2: Make more than one back up. Earlier this year I caught my first computer virus ever which caused me to have to reinstall Windows. Though I had been diligently backing up my data, upon attempting to restore the data I discovered the back up file had been corrupted. I was unable to retrieve the data due to the software vendor's proprietary file extension. Fortunately I recently upgraded the hard drive and still had the old disk which meant I lost only a small amount of data.
I'm so sorry Fedup, but isn't your laptop new? It's not even a year old. It should be under warranty...is it totally fried?
4 months new and under warranty. HP will be sending a replacement laptop, but IDK how long it will take. I was on the phone with HP who talked me through a diagnostic test, which said the hard drive needs to be replace. That was the moment I looked at my box of extra image data souces, and thankful I didn't trust a brand new computer
Lesson #2: Make more than one back up. Earlier this year I caught my first computer virus ever which caused me to have to reinstall Windows. Though I had been diligently backing up my data, upon attempting to restore the data I discovered the back up file had been corrupted. I was unable to retrieve the data due to the software vendor's proprietary file extension. Fortunately I recently upgraded the hard drive and still had the old disk which meant I lost only a small amount of data.
Totally agree with you about making more than one back up. I like to save my original photos to CD as well as uploading them to my external hard drive as even external hard drives can go bad. Since I no longer travel with a laptop and upload photos after a shoot or burn them to a CD, I transfer them to flash drives if I can borrow a computer or am in a cyber cafe so I can clear the memory cards and reuse them if I start to run out of memory on the cards. I was doing that every day but now have learned to wait until the memory card is fuller before I transfer the photos.
I also think it's better to have multiple smaller gig memory cards rather than one or two very big and expensive ones in case you lose one or it goes bad. And try not to let your cards get totally full.
Location: San Francisco & Fort Worth & Now, Back to IRAQ
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Absolute Priority Rule for all electronic data in life!
I never save anything to a computer hard drive but I always back up to a minimum of three places all in different locations, so no matter what or where I am, I can access my files.
First I save everything to an external TB hard drive, then I'll save everything to an online storage site, and then I save all my present working documents to a 550gb external hard drive that is super portable -- then to top it all off, I save all my files to my Dad's ISP -- he has an internet company in Arkansas -- and then he backs up that to three separate external hard drives!
I'll be long gone, but my files will be well stored! LOL!
Started doing all this overkill storage while working in Iraq. I had to store a lot of items in a secure location and saving it on the computer or lap top was the least secure method of all! After checking around with other consultants, this was a process I finally settled on. So far so good.. I've had many instances when one or more file was lost from one device or another, but since I had multiple back ups, I've yet to actually lose a single thing! Pretty Cool, better than insurance!
For those of us who shoot only in large RAW files, having two storage devices can be costly. As I get better and better with Photoshop, some files that a couple years ago would have been "throwaways" are now keepers for possible future (stacking?) use.
I guess maybe I can download to DVDs after storing on external drive.
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