Lost all my bus pictures!

[CindyandJohn]

Hello Guys,

IMHO - A little computer advice from a computer guy....  I would suggest a trip to Staples or Best Buy or any of those big chains... they sell external hard drives which hook up via USB. I prefer the ones made by Seagate or Western Digital. Many of them offer a feature called one button backup. They have software built in that will copy your hard drive to the backup drive... I keep one attached to my laptop and once a week make a backup - I will start it before bed and when I wake up it is finished. Weekly backups ensure that you will only be at most one week behind.  A month is a long time. You can also get any external hard drive (avoid the real cheapo ones - expect to pay $150.00) and using the anti-virus / firewall software from Microsoft called OneCare - there is an automated feature in there to run scheduled weekly or daily backups of all your data... I have this on a couple of my other systems and use the same idea - an external drive which holds the backups.  I am also a firm believer of duplications, keep the files on your computer and on the backup... or have two external drives and switch them from time to time...

Also as stated in this thread - if there are any files that you deeply desire to keep - burn them to either CD or DVD. CD's and DVD's have at least a 100 year shelf life... If any of you have older camera's that used floppy disks for film - make sure you get those pictures to a CD ASAP - floppy disks only have about a 3 year shelf life, I have had them fail after 6 months... and also, as mentioned above - all disk can fail and the longer you have your computer the more likely it will fail... unfortunately just like many things that are made these days - they are made to fail, otherwise we wouldn't need to buy new ones...

I hope this helps...

John

[Sojourner]

I have Sony DRX-81OUL external USB harddrive. Many other brands are good as long it come with user friendly software. It the best thing I ever purchase beside having printer. You may find one better than I have and at lower price.

You might check further if it still can be retrieved
http://the-undelete.com/
http://www.softsland.com/file-system.html
http://www.dposoft.net/
More in Google by typing....how to find lost file in damage hard drive

FWIW

Sojourn for Christ, Jerry

[H3Jim]

DML,

Windows Explorer is the program (under accessories) I use to copy etc.  Its not near as easy as what John and Sojourner use, but it will work. 

Partly I'm just used to it.  I run XP, and it was in accessories for earlier version of windows too.  I'm not sure about Vista.

[Jeremy]

My disk that failed was a Seagate external drive. It suffered some sort of mechanical or electronic failure whereby it still 'idled' but would not 'spin up' None of the usual file recovery utilities would work because it was the disk drive that was damaged, not the files. I did download a specialist program that took 24 hours to scan the entire disk (450 million sectors), but still could not actually read any data off it. I'm sure that if the disk was dissassembled in a clean room by a specialist company they could recover the entire contents - but apart from some photos there was nothing on it that I cannot ultimately replace - just have to start collecting some torrent files!

Jeremy

[CindyandJohn]

Jim,

Windows Explorer is in the same place on Vista. I use that to do most of my copy and paste of files on a normal basis, but when its time for a large backup - I prefer to let an automated system do that - I get too impatient waiting for the copy to finish. I have also had troubles in the past where on a desktop system without a battery backup - we had a power blip during a large copy like that and man what a head ache it created... Computers are great tools and make me money in the business but they can really be a pain in the butt sometimes... even computer technicians have computer problems!!!

My best point to be made is DUPLICATE!!! either on CD's, two hard drives, or two computers... because one of them will fail at some point in time!

John

[lyndon]

Lots of great advice here!

One more thing to think about is what would happen to your most valued files due to a disaster -- fire, flood, even theft. It would not be helpful to have both hard drive and backup media destroyed, so keep copies (DVD, CD) somewhere else: the bank, at work, a relative or trusted friend's place, anywhere else. Re-writable media even can be exchanged for updated versions and reuse on a weekly or monthly schedule.

Don

[CindyandJohn]

Yes Don you are absolutely correct. I forgot to put that point out there... I try to keep one copy at my office and one at home. If you dont have a place to keep one copy like at the office then think of a close relative's house. Almost all big companies keep off site copies of important backups... At the very least you can also keep a copy in a fire proof safe.

John

[Len Silva]

Hello Guys,

IMHO - A little computer advice from a computer guy....  I would suggest a trip to Staples or Best Buy or any of those big chains... they sell external hard drives which hook up via USB. I prefer the ones made by Seagate or Western Digital. Many of them offer a feature called one button backup. They have software built in that will copy your hard drive to the backup drive... I keep one attached to my laptop and once a week make a backup - I will start it before bed and when I wake up it is finished. Weekly backups ensure that you will only be at most one week behind.  A month is a long time. You can also get any external hard drive (avoid the real cheapo ones - expect to pay $150.00) and using the anti-virus / firewall software from Microsoft called OneCare - there is an automated feature in there to run scheduled weekly or daily backups of all your data... I have this on a couple of my other systems and use the same idea - an external drive which holds the backups.  I am also a firm believer of duplications, keep the files on your computer and on the backup... or have two external drives and switch them from time to time...

Also as stated in this thread - if there are any files that you deeply desire to keep - burn them to either CD or DVD. CD's and DVD's have at least a 100 year shelf life... If any of you have older camera's that used floppy disks for film - make sure you get those pictures to a CD ASAP - floppy disks only have about a 3 year shelf life, I have had them fail after 6 months... and also, as mentioned above - all disk can fail and the longer you have your computer the more likely it will fail... unfortunately just like many things that are made these days - they are made to fail, otherwise we wouldn't need to buy new ones...

I hope this helps...

John

So what is the shelf life of a flash drive?

Len

[CindyandJohn]

Len,

I am not too sure of the actual shelf life - but I personally would not use them for any sort of long term storage. They are really meant only to be used as portable storage - like bringing documents to and from work or school. They are a computer EPROM chip based device - which means they have no moving parts so failure in the sort of a hard drive wont happen, but when they get abused - like bouncing around in a brief case or pocket with keys, etc... they do fail. I have had many of them die on me for this reason - I usually have several of them thrown in the tool bag and really don't depend on them other then to move files... I do however have one I keep on my desk that I use to back up my QuickBooks file. I backup QuickBooks everytime I use it. Usually daily. I prefer to do that particular file daily so that if I did have a hard drive failure I do not have to make up a full week of business data in that program. I dont like doing double work and that is the software that tracks the business's income and expenses... but I do have my weekly external hard drive data backup as well... Duplication, Duplication... Off Site Storage.... and to top it all off - make sure you have up to date anti-virus software and be very weary of the back alleys of the internet!!! They are no different then the back alley of a city - you can meet up with very unsavory sorts...

John

[Nissan_DownUnder]

Gidday All

My solution has been to buy an external hard disk.  Once a month, I plug it in via the USB port & take a backup of "My Documents" .  I have my Outlook email directory pointing to a directory in "My Documents", so all my emails are backed up as well.

I keep the disk in a different room from the computer.  Hopefully, thieves will not find it.  I also take a DVD copy now & then that I keep at work.

Cheers
       Peter

[kingfa39]

After losing several hundred photos the one thing i learned is NEVER leave photos on your computer, put em on a cd asap, they will slow the computer, i was sitting there one day looking at mine , had what i call a computer glitch and the pictures started deleting and no way to stop them, i bought a small gadjet that plugs into the usb port and comes up on F drive, cant think of the name of it but they are not reliable either, had one go bad and lost some more photos, i think the CD is the way to go.
Frank Allen

[Songman]

I lost all the family and vacation pictures that I had copied over to a DVD for safe keeping a couple of years ago. I figured that putting them on a DVD would be safe... Hopefully I'll remember where I put the DVD one of these days! 

[kingfa39]

Found out the flash drives are not 100% either, lost a bunch of photos from one that went bad after only a few weeks.
Frank Allen

[tekebird]

WOW!! how did this escape the move to Off Topic?

[FloridaCliff]

WOW!! how did this escape the move to Off Topic?

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!