HDD Almost Lost my entire life...how to avoid this going forward

wyattspoppa · Nov 4, 2015

Hey my friends,
I'll try to be brief. For reasons unknown, when I reverted my Win 10 back to 7 (10 is a total nightmare!) my Hitachi Touro external HDD wouldn't be recognized...and it had every copy of my old PC's content, every family photo I've ever taken the last 15 yrs +, all I value digitally. Can't risk this again, I tried to load it to the Cloud, but it took like 10 minutes to do maybe 20 pics, I have 15,000! It would take a month to back it up to the Cloud at that pace, I could just buy a 2nd HDD, but I've got all my USB ports in use..please share with me how you guys safely back up your prized family photos.
Thanks so much
PS All I had to do to fix my HDD...it had 2 ports for the USB, I plugged it into the 2nd one and it was fixed immediately.

Cons29 · Nov 4, 2015

you have all your usb ports in use? why not remove one for now then make a backup. after that use the usb port again as you see fit

Nuwan Fernando · Nov 4, 2015

I use a RAID1 setup ensuring the Disk availability. Also I have some DVDs burned with the important data.

Solandri · Nov 4, 2015

Don't worry about all your USB ports being in use. You don't want your backup drive to be constantly connected. If it is, something like the bitcryptor malware can encrypt your backup, making it useless.

The best backup is offline and off site (so if your house burns down, you don't lose the backup). So temporarily unplug one of your USB devices, plug in the external HDD, make the backup, unplug the HDD, and (if you normally keep the computer at home) store it at work. Once a month, take the HDD home and update the backup (incremental or differential backups can make this a lot quicker).

Yes speed can be a big issue with cloud backups. If it's taking 10 min to do 20 pics, you must have a slow Internet connection. You may want to haul your computer over to a friend's house with faster Internet to make the initial backup. Subsequent backups only upload changed files, so won't take as long. Alternately, you can use cloud backup only for your most important files and pics. Better yet, backup your most important files and pics to a USB flash drive, take that to a friend's house with faster internet, and make the initial backup there. That gives you a backup both on the cloud and on a flash drive which you can store in your car or at work.

Nuwan Fernando :

Just to be clear, RAID is not a backup. If you accidentally overwrite a file on RAID-1, both copies get overwritten and the original is gone forever. RAID is for redundancy. If your business would lose millions of dollars if the file server is down, you want it to be on RAID so a single disk failure does not take it down.

WORM (write once, read many) media like DVDs are blu-rays are less convenient than HDDs, but they have a significant advantage in that you can't accidentally delete backed up files. One of my photos got corrupted once. No big deal since I had a backup. I plugged in the backup drive, and had a brain fart and copied the corrupted file over the good backup. Goodbye forever photo. You can't do that with optical media since once it's written, it can't be erased (short of destroying the disc).

wyattspoppa · Jul 25, 2016

Solandri :

Don't worry about all your USB ports being in use. You don't want your backup drive to be constantly connected. If it is, something like the bitcryptor malware can encrypt your backup, making it useless.

The best backup is offline and off site (so if your house burns down, you don't lose the backup). So temporarily unplug one of your USB devices, plug in the external HDD, make the backup, unplug the HDD, and (if you normally keep the computer at home) store it at work. Once a month, take the HDD home and update the backup (incremental or differential backups can make this a lot quicker).

Yes speed can be a big issue with cloud backups. If it's taking 10 min to do 20 pics, you must have a slow Internet connection. You may want to haul your computer over to a friend's house with faster Internet to make the initial backup. Subsequent backups only upload changed files, so won't take as long. Alternately, you can use cloud backup only for your most important files and pics. Better yet, backup your most important files and pics to a USB flash drive, take that to a friend's house with faster internet, and make the initial backup there. That gives you a backup both on the cloud and on a flash drive which you can store in your car or at work.

Nuwan Fernando :

Just to be clear, RAID is not a backup. If you accidentally overwrite a file on RAID-1, both copies get overwritten and the original is gone forever. RAID is for redundancy. If your business would lose millions of dollars if the file server is down, you want it to be on RAID so a single disk failure does not take it down.

WORM (write once, read many) media like DVDs are blu-rays are less convenient than HDDs, but they have a significant advantage in that you can't accidentally delete backed up files. One of my photos got corrupted once. No big deal since I had a backup. I plugged in the backup drive, and had a brain fart and copied the corrupted file over the good backup. Goodbye forever photo. You can't do that with optical media since once it's written, it can't be erased (short of destroying the disc).

Very good information, can you tell me about how many DVD's I'd need to back up say 1,000 pics, I'm guessing it matters how I shot them, correct ?(high rez about 1-1.5 mb per photo). Oh, and I have quick internet speed, I think a virus is slowing down my PC. Thanks so much,

Solandri · Jul 26, 2016

wyattspoppa :

A single-layer DVD stores 4.7 GB. So 4700 1MB photos, 3133 1.5 MB photos.

If you have fast internet once you get the virus problem resolved, Google Photos lets you backup an unlimited number of photos in the cloud for free up to 2048x2048 resolution. If you've got a gmail account, just login to that, and go to Google Photos.
https://www.google.com/photos/about/

If you don't have a gmail account, make one - it's free. If you have an Android phone, you have a gmail account even if you aren't using it. It'll be your "Google account". Download the Google Photos app for Android and you can have your phone backup pics to your Google account automatically as you take them. The free Google Photos account also includes unlimited storage of videos up to 1080p and 15 minutes long (which the Photos app will also back up).

If you have Amazon Prime, it includes unlimited cloud storage of photos of any size.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/primephotos

If you subscribe to Office365, it includes 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/office-365-subscribers-now-have-access-to-1-tb-of-onedrive-storage/

Wyattspoppa10 · Jul 27, 2016

Solandri :

wyattspoppa :

A single-layer DVD stores 4.7 GB. So 4700 1MB photos, 3133 1.5 MB photos.

If you have fast internet once you get the virus problem resolved, Google Photos lets you backup an unlimited number of photos in the cloud for free up to 2048x2048 resolution. If you've got a gmail account, just login to that, and go to Google Photos.
https://www.google.com/photos/about/

If you don't have a gmail account, make one - it's free. If you have an Android phone, you have a gmail account even if you aren't using it. It'll be your "Google account". Download the Google Photos app for Android and you can have your phone backup pics to your Google account automatically as you take them. The free Google Photos account also includes unlimited storage of videos up to 1080p and 15 minutes long (which the Photos app will also back up).

If you have Amazon Prime, it includes unlimited cloud storage of photos of any size.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/primephotos

If you subscribe to Office365, it includes 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/office-365-subscribers-now-have-access-to-1-tb-of-onedrive-storage/

Wow, I have all those services/devices and had no idea all those free backup resources were available to me, thanks so much!

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HDD Almost Lost my entire life...how to avoid this going forward

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