I’ve had quite a few computers since I started becoming interested in digital photography and found myself very quickly filling up my internal hard drives. So I bought a LaCie 250GB external hard drive which (up until last week) had faihfully served me on three different computers and in five different houses/flats (i.e. it’s been used and moved about a lot). I’ve read quite a lot recently that when it comes to hard drive failures, it’s not a question of “if” but “when” will it happen. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising then that it should happen to me.

I was becoming quite nervous that my files weren’t adequately backed up (I had a second hard drive which I manually backed up my files with but hadn’t done so for a very long time) so I thought it was time to take action. I bought two Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus 1TB external hard drives which come with backup software which would allow me (with the touch of a button – do you see what they’ve done?) to back up one drive to the other. I was feeling very smug about myself and even thought that I would write a post here to tell all you bad people who don’t back up properly to mend your sorry ways.

So perhaps that’s why when I went to open my hard drive to copy over the files that I was presented with an alarming message telling me that my old LaCie hard drive was not formatted and asking if I would like to format it now. Even I knew that (a) that’s not a good message and (b) NO – I don’t want to format my hard drive with over 50,000 and 4 years of photographs on it!

Thankfully I didn’t panic and clicked “no”. I tried restarting my computer but again my hard drive wasn’t being recognised properly. That’s ok, I thought, it’ll be a problem with my computer – it’s a couple of years old and to be honest, I don’t treat it very well. Perhaps it’s just given up on me. So I tried plugging the hard drive into my laptop (which I’m much better at looking after) but unfortunately I was getting the same message.

At this point I got very, very scared – how was I supposed to try and recover my photos if I couldn’t even open the hard drive? Naturally I got my friend google to help me out and downloaded a few recovery programs to try and save the day. I found out how painfully slow these programs are at scanning your hard drive (about 6 hours) and in the meantime I was becoming more and more concerned at the number of forum posts I was reading where the authors weren’t being able to find a solution to the same problem.

The first two programs I tried cruelly teased me by looking as if they were finding files only at the last minute to tell me “Sorry, you’re stuffed”. I then stumbled across www.experts-exchange.com where some of its member were having identical issues to me. So I took them up on their 7 day free trial (which, incidentally, writing this article has reminded me to cancel) and noticed that a program – GetDataBack - was being recommended again and again. I forked out $40 for the program (a miniscule price to pay to get my photos back) and gave it a shot.

Another 6 hours later and it found all of my files! Success! What a reflief to know that I hadn’t lost them forever. I honestly couldn’t imagine what I would have done if I had lost all of those photographs. At one point I was seriously considering just jacking the whole photography thing in I was that disconsolate.

I’ve now got a copy of all of my photos on one of my 1TB drives with a complete backup on the other 1TB drive. I’ll also make sure that I backup everytime I upload new photos so that I’ll know that if one of my drives fail again I’ll have a complete copy elsewhere.

I know it’s still not the most sophisticated backup plan but it’ll do for now. I’m sure you are all much smarter than me and already have a backup plan in action, but if not, please get one!