The Importance of Having a Backup of a Backup
The golden rule for every photographer, whether you’re a hobbyist or a professional, is the safekeeping of our photos. The most common way to backup our images is through an external hard drive. For more advanced choices, you may opt for RAID systems or cloud storage but they are quite pricey especially if you want to back up terabytes of data.
When the lockdown started in Manila, I was digging up old photos. As I was browsing, I had an idea in mind for a project and I quickly started collating qualified images. But after a few days, my external hard drive got corrupted. I tried doing some stuff from the internet but I held back in fear of causing more damage. It was the only backup of all my photos - all the important memories, experiences, and milestones of my life with friends and family spanning almost a decade! I felt devastated and hopeless.
I want to share with you the mistake I did.
I have three hard drives - 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. Both the smaller drives were already full so I had to back them up to the 4TB which I recently bought. However, since both drives were in NTFS format, I could not copy or move the files because that format is only readable and writeable in windows only. There’s an option for mac but I need to pay some buck for the software. With a little help, I was able to transfer all the data using a windows laptop.
And here comes my dumb mistake. After transferring all data to the 4TB drive, I decided to reformat both the 1TB and 2TB drives to exFAT format so it would both be readable and writeable for both windows and mac. Knowing that the 4TB was somehow new and one of the leading global brands for data storage with positive reviews, I decided to postpone the transfer to some other time until I completely forgot about it. Raise your hand if you think I was dumb! Haha.
During the lockdown, I was only able to import and make a catalog of images from 2011 to 2013 in Capture One. Some of the photos were successful in building previews while others failed. The images shown in the gallery above are only screenshots that I took from the library module. I wasn’t able to import all photos starting from 2014 up until 2019 since the 4TB drive got corrupted by that time. I am now at the mercy of data recovery professionals and I hope they can salvage majority if not all of the 3TB data.
Here are the lessons that I learned:
1. Don’t procrastinate - whatever you need and can do today, do it.
2. Don’t let your photos rut in your hard drive. Upload it somewhere and share it with the world.
3. Don’t be content with one or two back-ups and don’t settle for just one system.
4. If you need to pay to protect your important data, do it - for safety and peace of mind.
5. Don’t try to retrieve the files yourself as you may cause more damage. Instead, consult with professionals and let them do their job well.
6. Be prepared for the worst and it’s okay to cry. Haha!
Do you think I missed something? Feel free to comment and share your thoughts with me!