A word to the wise....

Back up back up back up back up ... but don't stop there...back up!

I had my children's photos and digital kits on a 500 GB ehd and a duplicate 500 GB ehd...both failed within a day of each other. back up back up back up!

I took both drives to Best Buy's Geek Squad....they could not recover my data. They said if they send it off to their HQ it could run from $250 to $1,500!

I just spent $645 to the guys at Hypertech for my data recovery....I'm still going through all the stuff (some is organized some is dumped in folders and some are scattered)...so I'm a bit broke this week! ...but it SEEMS so far that most of my pictures are back! I haven't had time to look for digital kits yet...so don't know if they got those restored or not.

Luckily I had all or most of my SSD kits on another drive so those were saved! yay

That happened to me in December... STILL not done sorting through the stuff that was recovered and dumped into folders with nine-digit numbers for names. It also duplicated TONS so it's a huge mess. THOUGHT I had saved some SSD stuff, but when I open it, they are corrupt old zips. Fingers crossed I get through it all soon!

Got a new EHD- I'm getting Mozy I think- I have 2 EHDs now and the idea of BOTH crashing would kill me.

Oh my gosh that is awful. I'm so sorry that happened to you. I have 3 EHD's and I still get freaked out about them all dying out on me. I hope you can get everything sorted out - thank goodness all the pictures seem to be there!!

So, what is the absolute best way to be safe? If EHD are not 100% safe then what is? Should I burn everything I want on disks? Should I load it all up to a place on the web? What have you found to be the most effective for long term storage. I need to know. the thought of my EHD failing gives me heart palpitations!!!!!:blink::blink::blink:

I'm sorry it was expensive and now a mess, but thank goodness they recovered all of your photos! I have my photos backed up on CD and Mozy, and every few months I also back them up to EHD. I should try to be better about the EHD.

Rae's World said:

So, what is the absolute best way to be safe? If EHD are not 100% safe then what is?

Click to expand...

Unfortunately, nothing is foolproof. The best method IMO is just to have multiple backups up to date and preferably one off site.

Oh gosh, that's awful. So sorry both your EHD's crashed. :thumbdown:

I have an automatic back up of my laptop hard-drive and then another EHD that stores all my pics/scrap stuff which I back up to DVD's. I'm looking to purchase another EHD to back up the drive w/ all my pics/scrap stuff also.

I'm so sorry! that's awful! I would be devastated!

I have mine on both computers and burned to CDs. I am going to burn them to DVDs soon and have DH store them at work.

That's awful!!! We just got a new external to replace the one that was dumb and it has two hardrives that are copies of each other - and we have a series of disks that we burn every couple of months. I know nothing's safe... but I couldn't believe two hardrives crashing within days of each other!! I hope you get it all worked out soon.

I'm so sorry that happened! I know the anguish! I'm still resorting my stuff from when my drive crashed in June. It takes FOREVER. So now we have our pictures synced to both of our computers, we have an EHD, and we're planning on making a physical backup and taking it to my parents' house next time we see them. Better safe than sorry!

sooo sorry sharon!! that's crap!!

so one EHD isn't good enough?

I just have one EHD, which is the orginals of all my scrapping stuff. I peridoically burn photos to discs, one copy for my house, one for my parent's house. Other than that, I have Mozy. I've had it about 5 months now and it's still working on my initial backup (45GB...plus what I've bought since Sept...) But, it backs up pictures really quickly. So, I'm sleeping pretty good these days...

Right now I back up everything to disks, plus one EHD. I try to give my mom a copy of all of our pics on disks too...since we live in the heart of tornado alley, if we got hit, everything would be gone LOL (hoping that does NOT happen!).
We're planning on getting a fireproof/waterproof safe this year for important stuff, including disks, and also signing up with Mozy.
Having my HD crash last month and watching Sharon's computer problems (2 or 3 months worth, I think?!) has scared me into backing up and backing up and backing up!

Yeah, it's definitely my "been there, done that" history that has me so good about backing up. My 1st laptop (in '99 or 2000) was a lemon from the start, and since then I've had more than 1 HD fail or show signs it was failing. I knew photos were the 1 thing I couldn't stand to lose (and now LOs, too), so I became very good about multiple layers of backup. But it really stinks when you have multiple backups like Sharon and it's still not enough!