Photography Forums

My external back ups were two LaCie hard drives but the other day both disappeared from the list of drives and I could not access them. 5 years of photographs disappeared just like that. I thought that by duplicating my back ups I was fool proof if one went down, but two going down at the same time must be a million to one.
One of the external LaCie big disc's was less than twelve months old and within its warantee period, so I informed LaCie who replied that they are not responsible for data recovery. I then sent the drive to a data recovery company as the data was not only my photographs but all my correspondence, so it is essential to my business. It is costing me £464 to recover the data and I still await its return.
LaCie now say that the drive has been opened so it is out of warantee.
It goes without saying that I am distraught with LaCie and the way they dealt with this potential catastrophe.
The lesson to be learned is that two back up hard drives are not necessarily enough and to carefully consider which make of hard drive you buy.

I use a Western Digital right now, as well as CDs to burn and store stuff I won't be using again for some time. Such files as photos that are dated and burned once a month so I know which to burn to backup. I've also looked into using an online backup to offset the chance of losing everything due to a natural disaster. We really don't think enough about what happens if our equipment malfunctions until it happens.

I have suffered a seven thousand photo loss at one point. And still, it hasn't driven me to find a better, permanent solution to my data storage.

I really need to look more at off site storage, perhaps find myself a decent web host to put them on.

I know PcWorld are offering a free 1GB data backup at the minute and you can pay more for more storage if you wish. Its backed up on to two different servers in two different locations so if one went down you would not loose your data. Its also pretty much as secure as banks apprarantly. I work there and was reading up on it and seemed very safe. Thought i would share it with you lol.