Whelp! I Lost A Hard Drive Full of Photos!!

Even those of us who are in the ‘business’ of helping others with technology, and specifically photos are not void of having tech problems ourselves. So what happened to my drive and what can I do about it?

First of all, make sure that any external hard drives that you are using to store data on, are being backed up to some other hard drive or cloud back up solution. In my case, this 2tb external drive was being backed up regularly to BackBlaze. This is a great company that provides you with an abundance of options to back up your entire computer and numerous external drives for a few dollars a month depending upon your needs.

Since I had this external hard drive backed up to BackBlaze, I can easily ask to restore that data back down to my computer to another external drive or my main hard drive if there is enough space.

No hard drive is going to be a safe long term storage solution today. There are only so many ‘read/write’ cycles that the manufacturers will say a device has before it ‘fails’. When will it fail? Most hard drives fail between 3 - 5 years. This particular drive was an SSD drive, known to be a little safer from failure than the spinning drives that many of us have purchased for 30+ years now.

1. When you get a new hard drive - try and put a date sticker on it somewhere so that you know when it was purchased.

2. Purchase trusted name brands. I like Samsung and LaCie.

3. Back up your drives on an automated schedule.

Backblaze reports on failed drives regularly and it’s interesting to see which brands and size hard drives fail the most often. You may want to check this latest Backblaze report and see if you have a drive that is showing up on this list. It would be high time to copy your data off of that drive and put it on a new fresh external drive and the setup a cloud back up so that you don’t have to worry if it will fail, because it’s only a matter of time before it does!

Confused about your options? We can help. We are familiar with both PC’s and Mac computers and the numerous cloud back up options for all of your computers, and external hard drives. So whether you’re trying to back up one folder, your entire computer or just your photo library, we have solutions for you at all price levels so you can rest at ease that you’re protected from failing hard drives.