A reminder to back up your photos!!

[dinosaw]

Ok so not really specifically a chickens post so I understand if it gets moved but as this page gets more traffic than the photos page I wanted to remind as many people as possible to make sure that they regularly back up their photos and anything else valuable to them saved on their pc's and laptops. My laptop went down last week and with it two years worth of photos including hundreds of the chickens, I had simply got lazy about backing up new stuff every few months and before I knew it, whoosh, two years had passed. I have been very lucky in that I have been able to retrieve them so no harm done this time but I could have lost the lot and really would have been kicking myself.

 

[chrismahon]

We've had a hard drive fail Dinosaw and lost everything. They can be recovered but the cost is astronomical as there are so many hard drive variations. So we back up onto a memory stick at the same time the photos are downloaded from the camera.

 

[foxy]

Good reminder Dino...specially as photos in this digital age are so easy to lose! :roll:

 

[MalcolmP]

Yep, good reminder Dino, guess what you have just reminded me to do !

I have been lucky in the past, my failures have always been the computers, leaving the drives ok to then be recovered by installing in the new machine or, more recently, by plugging the old drive into a USB harness.
If you have not come across them - an easy way of recovering a drive if you dont want to install the old drive in your shiny new computal. There are ( or were, I've not checked recently ) two varieties. A cheaper open wiring type harness that plugs onto the back of the drive and ends in a USB lead. Or a propper job consisting of a box into which you install the drive. They should come with their own power supplies as most older drives in desktops need more power than a USB port can supply.

With external drives so cheap I now have a pair of 1TB USBs, one is the backup of our three computers and the second is the backup of the backup !

 

[dinosaw]

Great bit of info about the USB harness Malcolm 17 , just watched a video of how to do it on youtube and it seems quite straightforward.

 

[MalcolmP]

seems quite straightforward.

Yes, very.
Only one very historic caveat, way back in the days of 8086 and 286, (when windoze was but a twinkle in the eye of BG) when DOS ruled the world there was a standards confusion on the plug keyway and the whole thing could get inverted ( ie pin 1 became not the first but the last ) that was when 10Mb was a big disk, not likely to be encountered these days !

The nice thing about the harness is that all those drives ex machina that one aquires over the years, the 10Gb -50Gb etc, can easily hold particular treasures or private stuff and if it aint attached to your computal it aint on the internet and it cant be compromised.
/paranoia

Mindyu, since getting my pair of 1TB backups, nothing has failed,,,, Murphy? or tempting providence ??

 

[Icemaiden]

DOS... Those were the days, when files stayed where you put them, & you had to be creative with the 8 characters of the file name so you know what was what...
So much easier than Windows 7 09

 

[MalcolmP]

when files stayed where you put them

17 17 17
In directories ! ( <<-- when they were called by their real name !!)