I’m a keen amateur photographer. Inevitably, I was asked to do a wedding for a friend and I’m happy to say it went well.
However, after completing many hours of editing, while I was printing out a contact sheet my hard drive disappeared. I’d just tried to ‘safely’ eject a USB stick and presumed I’d messed up. After an hour of trying to reconnect it without success I had a close look at the hard drive itself. It was dead; like a Monty Python parrot.
I’d been thinking about getting a new 5TB HDD to use as a backup but hadn’t quite got round to it. The 5TB HDD I had was quite new, it just worked and I was confident (until now) that it would just keep on working. How wrong I was and in the middle of producing arguably the most important photos I had ever taken. It was devastating.
I started looking at data recovery. Everyone had a tale of scams and high costs (£750 seemed to be a constant) and my wife suggested we cancel our holiday to fund it. What else could I do? I got the thing packaged up ready to deliver to a company I hoped would be okay when an IT friend suggested I try the power supply. As I had another Seagate HDD I plugged it in –it powered up and all my files were there. The relief was immense. All I bought was a new power adapter for £14 and all is well. I am now waiting for delivery of my new backup HDD.
I’ve read a million warnings about backing up and thought it would never happen to me. Even though my best work was online, I nearly lost 6 years of effort as that HDD was the repository of all my personal work.
There are two morals to this story. Don’t take your equipment for granted, it can fail. Back it up before you don’t get a chance to. The second is if it does fail, it might be something simple.
If you too have read a million warnings about backing up, you’ve now read a million and one.
You can see some of my photos on my website. But wear sun glasses because they are dazzling mhbphoto.uk
mhbphoto.wordpress.com 