NO NO NO NO!!!!!

Nightmare has come true. External hard drive has failed with about 100gig of photo's on it including all the stuff I was working on from the swimsuit shoot last weekend. Looking online most recovery services want an arm and a leg to try to get anything off of it. Any suggestions?

It powers up and I can feel the disk spinning, but the light sequence doesn't run like it usually does and the computer doesn't see that it's hooked up.

Well, that couldn't hurt to try. I am picking up another one on the way home today though. I have a pretty good idea what may have caused it though.

I use my laptop all the time outside of the house, but the internal drives are too small for any real storage and the thing is old and slow. So in a situation like this past weekend I'll just download my cards to the external wherever I'm at. Using a couple power adapters I can even do this in the car on the way somewhere or on site. Plus the only internat service we can get out in the sticks where I live is dial-up, so I just put what I need to upload on the external and pack it around all the time. I think that all this moving around in a backpack all the time may be too much jostling around for it.

Anybody know of a tough version of an external? I like being able to use it like this. Fry's has a one day special on their website with a 750gb Western Digital USB for $119 and there's a store right around the corner from work. That would be nice to keep at the house. But I wouldn't mind something tough enough to pack around all the time.

Another reason I use an external is a little something I figured out when we left for Hurricane Rita. I had the pack the entire desktop case to Waco with the rest of our stuff. If the house had flooded insurence would have covered the cost of the computer easily, but not the data. Now it's easy to dump everything on the external and pack it up the next time the wind blows our way.

What about one of the Western Digital passport types?  They're pretty small and would be easy to carry around.

How much data do you need to keep available?  What about a 32gb CF card and a reader?  That would get rid of any moving parts to bounce around.  And it would be tiny compared to a USB drive.

That's exactly the same reason I started backing up to an external, except in my case it was 3 computers.  My active files from all 3 are backed every night to a drive that lives by my monitors so that I can quickly unplug and go if I need to.  Although it looks like I'm going to have to change since that little drive is nearing capacity. 

Somewhere I've got pictures of the road between Houston and Austin during that fun little road trip that I need to dig out. 

That event made me belive that no one in southeast Texas knows how to use a map anymore. As we were packing up I was hearing how the freeways were backing up so I pulled out the trusty Texas atlas and figured out how to take back roads almost all the way to Waco. We were sitting in my wife'a uncle's living room watching the lemmings panic and whine on the major roads. We did have a little delay getting throught the first 10 miles of our trip getting through Magnolia, but after that we were on empty roads. It took us about 45 minutes longer than normal not counting the extra delay at first.

Same with us, except that we lost power for a couple days. My parents stayed and had some of our other family members stay with them. Their house was too full for my taste so we trekked up to Waco. Actually worked out well for us. We were kicked back at Baylor where my wife's uncle is a professor while the rest of my family was sweating it out with no power. It made for a nice road trip minus all the extra packing and unpacking.

Have you ever thought of using a portable hard drive for traveling instead of an external? I've never used one (I will starting next week, but at this point its not open yet), but it seems that they are made especially for having large amounts of storage that's made to carry around, and they are smaller (with not too much of a price difference) than the traditional externals.

http://shop3.frys.com/product/5629651;jsessionid=ZdAVm0aG35YUBb7is2abXA

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8761903&st=portable+hard+drive&type=product&id=1202650704851

Thanks! I'm excited because my dad just bought a portable that we will be playing with next week (We're going up to Wyoming and through Yellowstone). It should make it much easier to clear off the memory cards. I just bought a polarizer too.  I'll be sure to post some pictures on PAF when I get back. Oh, and I've been good. Just busy. :-P

There are a couple of different solutions to keep data safe. It's usually a bad idea to trust a HDD, HDD die all the time... they have moving parts and wear off...

Basically you want to backup to cds or dvds, if you are paranoic, backup twice on dvd's and cd's.

You also could use a RAID1, but a problem in the power supply or voltage spike could still kill all your HDDs. The most paranoic solution is online backup. Then you can rest assure that even if you lose your house to a disaster, your data will still be safe.

If you decide to use online backups, I would suggest one with the following:

- encryption (means they cant really read your data)
- offsite backup (disasters can always occur and the service provider is not free from them)
- versioning, this means that if you overwrite by mistake, you still can retrieve the older version (before the overwrite)
- good bandwidth and good capacity and price