Back up, back up, back up!
 

On Prime Day I bought a USB powered external hard drive. I no longer use my desktop that sits in the basement. I have been exclusively using my laptop. My old external has to be plugged into power and isn't portable. No bueno when you are trying to use a laptop.

Anyway, I plugged both drives into the laptop and started transferring from the old to the new. I got partway through my digi supplies and my old external freaked on me. My digi folder on there is now completely not responding. I can access every other folder except my digi-scrapping one. YEARS (like 15) of kits and probably thousands of dollars are in that folder!

Thankfully, when my drive was connected downstairs it was backed up to Crash Plan. I've been retrieving files for days now. It is a slow going process. The crazy thing was, I had just cancelled my Crash Plan. I've been using their service since 2013 and finally decided to move to something different. I cancelled it and I was exactly ONE day before my files would have been deleted! I quickly re-subscribed and started downloading my files. It cost me $20 to do so instead of the cheap price I was grandfathered in at before I dropped my plan, but well worth it to retrieve my precious files!!

Long story short, ALWAYS back up. Then back up your back up files!!

Once I am finished, I am going to purchase another external and back up to it as well. I've also started Back Blaze with my laptop and the new EHD. I learned my lesson... don't skip the online backups.

Where else can I back up to? I have some kits in Google Drive, but my unlimited Google Drive will only last as long as my job does. I'm not intending to leave right now or anything but I also don't want to have all my personal stuff tied to my work account.

Oh wow! Thank goodness you still had access to it before it was completely gone! I don't have an online backup, just one EHD backup. I really need to look into having another backup plan.

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Glad you are able to recover!
I back up to:
EHDs
CrashPlan

So glad you were able to recover your DS supplies! Funny, I also bought an EHD on Prime day. :) I try to remember the 3 2 1 Rule: keep (at least) 3 copies of your files on at least 2 different media and keep 1 copy off-site (for many people that's in The Cloud). Maybe this has been talked about here before, but I just love that strategy.
For me, besides whatever is on my laptop, I currently have:
5 EHDs at home
BackBlaze, which I've had for about 1.5 years and I love it. Hopefully you love it, too!
Amazon Prime Photos for my photos and LOs. It's free for Prime members and super easy to use.
Two about-half-full EHDs at my parents' house. Those are my extra "other location" EHDs. I go there about once a year and add to them. I write down the date I was there so I know roughly what needs to be added. (This is more for photos than for every.single.kit. I've purchased since I was last there. For DS, I back up what I see in a quick glance on my laptop.) They live in another part of the country so having EHDs at their place is another great "physical location."

Anyway, let me say yet again how glad I am you are able to recover you supplies! It must have been such a sinking feeling when you realized you couldn't access the folder.

I'm so glad you had everything backed up, Sherri!!! What a scary thing to go through!
I am paranoid about backing up, and after hearing so many stories about people losing files, I'm glad that I am!

Way back when I was running out of drive space and I moved all of my photos onto CDs. Huge mistake. Several of the CDs had bad sectors and I lost a year's worth of photos... all from my daughter at age 2. I was able to find a few here and there that I had burned to other CDs to have printed and I found some saved for web sized ones that I was able to pull from various places to at least have, but it was such a blow to me to lose them. I lost a lot of digi supplies back then as well, but the pictures meant so much more. If you did digital scrapbooking in 2004, you know that things have came a long way so the loss of those kits wasn't a big deal. Shortly after that I started using Mozy and I've used an online backup since. I rarely have to access any of it but I am ever so thankful to have it just in case!

I may be downloading for a week at this rate, but I'm at least touching every folder and being reminded of what kits are in there. :) It wouldn't be so bad, but this is also finals week so I'm stressing!

Thanks for the push. When I got my new laptop a year and a half ago I couldn’t figure out how to transfer backblaze to my new computer so I stopped it. I have everything on an EHD and really need to backup. You’re making me nervous...

Glad you were able to recover your files!!! How heart wrenching to realize the EHD crashed!


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What a pain! Hope You got everything back.

I hadn't backed up anything for about 6 months - after seeing your post this morning I went and backed up everything today!! Should have done it ages ago... My husband has issues with storing anything in the cloud so I have to manually do it all to two external drives (one for scrapbooking stuff and one for photos and other stuff), plus photos and scrapbooking stuff again to another external/portable drive - that's the one I'll grab if the house is burning down!

I have a CD like that :( I've just held onto it and am hoping someday I'll get the photos from it. :crying:

Good luck with finals!!

I have two EHDs but also am going to start putting a copy on our amazon prime. I've lost too many photos and digi supplies over the yrs to ever have just one copy of anything again. It's such a gut wrenching feeling when you lose stuff.

Glad you got your files back! This is exactly why I back up my backups on 2 EHD and a flash drive.

Thanks for the reminder!

I have 3 EHD's. 1 is for my kits. 1 is for my photos. My layouts are on both of them and on the laptop. And I can't think of what the 3rd one is for (it's newer). I think it's a 2nd photo backup.

What a relief you were able to get your stuff back! I have everything on EHD (which I'm about to replace, because it's getting older) and I also have a paid dropbox account with 2T of storage, so that's also become my cloud backup. I use it for photos and my CU stash at this point. I did Backblaze for a while, but it never seemed to stop uploading (and I mean months!) and it really slowed down our internet. Mind you, that was several years ago and we have much better/faster internet service out here now so it probably wouldn't be as bad now.

After too many EHD failures I finally did Back Blaze and am so glad I have. Yes, back up your files.

Thanks for the reminder, I haven't backed mine up for so long! I've got 3 EHD's that have so much random and duplicate stuff on and it's so overwhelming :blink:

My laptop is being weird and I'm planning on sending it for repair so I'll have to back up before I can do that.

I’m still retrieving files! I may just take my laptop to work. The internet there is super fast. I don’t work for another 2 weeks but I am tempted to go in anyway.

I'm reading this and my heart is pounding
https://media3.giphy.com/media/3o6Zs...bSWQ/giphy.gif

But you got them back!!
https://media0.giphy.com/media/3ornj...8Rr2/giphy.gif

I'm like you. I have my digiscrapping files and photos backed up on two different hard drives and am currently looking at a third one to back them up because I'm scared to lose them all!!

I'm so glad you got them back, but yes BACK UP!!!
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_JKdDNjAtwI...uter-crash.gif

I am SOOOO happy you were able to get your files! I have been there, an erased HD and it is NOT fun. Photos lost forever.. really sad weeks!! I'm so happy your calamity has a happy ending though! Yes, back up, back up, back up!

Wow! This has been a long process, Sherri!

Thank you!! I've been backing up for a while now, especially all my photos, but my digi files are just on one EHD. I do use Dropbox, but I think I'll back up to another EHD since I have a few. I might fill up my Dropbox with all my files!

Been there, done that. I got a new computer almost two years ago with a new internal EHD and had planned to move everything over from my nearly 10 year old EHD as a backup. Needless to say, I kept procrastinating that. And then last year one day my old EHD went boom and wouldn't work at all. Thankfully I have a crashplan backup, I had 10 looooooong days of downloading everything to the new internal EHD and since then have made a better backup too. Always have backups for your backup!

Oh my! Glad you were able to get it all!

Back Blaze has saved me more times than I can count!! It backs up my desktop, and two 4tb drives. Before BB I did lose some pages and files. I also upload all photos to Shutterfly. I only keep duplicate folders of stuff on my laptop, and usually use Dropbox to move files between computers.

I just started using Amazon Prime, and I think I have heard they have photo storage. Was going to check that out too. Especially since I heard that the same company that owns Snapfish (not nearly as good quality as Shutterfly) now own Shutterfly.

I learned this the very hard and expensive way. I paid a company around $1300 to retrieve my gigs and gigs of photos (JUST the photos) on a failed drive approximately 15 years ago. Now it's all backed up to two external hard drives and the photos (and scrapped pages) get a third backup to Smugmug.

I'm so glad you were able to retrieve your files. Backing up is essential! :)