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Washington Babies
Are. You. Effing. Kidding. Me.
It happened again. Remember last year when DH basically lost all our photos of Lila from birth to 6 months? Yeah. FUUUUUCK.
Since then, everything has been backing up to "Time Machine", which basically makes a back up of everything on the hard drive every single minute. Literally every minute. Except that apparently on March 23 something bad got written to the hard drive and it seems like it must have been in in one of the photo folders because everything else since then is backed up just fine, but all the picture folders since then just aren't there. I was still able to see them all until a couple days ago my computer started freezing up. DH took it into to the Apple store and the diagnosed that the hard drive was failing. So it wasn't until he got the hard drive in last night that he figured out they were gone.
I'm practically shaking.
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Re: Are. You. Effing. Kidding. Me.
OMG - I would die.
I am SO sorry M - that's heartbreaking 
FWIW, we back up weekly to an second internal hard drive AND to an external hard drive that I take to the office. Since this has happened twice, you might want to think about that.
Definitely. We thought we were uber safe with Time Machine backing it up every minute. From here on out I'll probably want a couple extra back up drives, online backup and probably CDs of every damn thing.
Blar.
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I am sorry
I hope they can recover some of it.
My DH: He buys a 1 TB "Terra station" back up machine then he formats it, mirrors the hard drives. (There are 4 hard drives inside it and he formatted it so that drive A copies to drive C, and drive B copies to drive D.)
Our machine is starting to fail in one of the hard drives (it has a little light that starts flashing.) No worries though because there is an exact copy on another drive in the machine.
I would guess your DH is not super geeky like mine, but I am sure you could find someone that could easily do it for you in a few hours. (and given that are terra station is almost full after 5 years, I would go with a 2 TB station if you back up everything.)
I'm going to make an AWESOME big brother.
Oh no! I'm so sorry
I hope they're able to recover everything for you!
We use the Time Machine too but we also have an external drive attached that backs up as well. Though now I'm thinking we need to be backing up double.
After this happened to you last time, I did just that. Everything is backed up online, in CD form, and on my external, but only the first year. I need to do this with all the second year pics as well. Yikes! I am so sorry, M!
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Maxwell Joseph 4/09 Lucy Violet 10/12
This! That's awful!
I back up to an external HD and have also considered using an online back up like moz, carbonite or smugmug. I hope you recover everything!
Hate it! This is what we do though, we have it on an external hard drive and I do photo CD's every few months. So sorry!
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This exactly! I am so sorry! I haven't backed mine up for a couple months so it looks like that will be one of my projects this weekend.
So, DH just explained a bit more to me. Time Machine apparently was already backing up to an external drive. But because the main hard drive was failing, it was the bad data that it was backing up. And because we had no idea the hard drive was failing, there was nothing that could have been done. No amount of backing up to external drives would have made a difference because the source data was bad. (Though, I suppose uploading to an online host or burning to CDs would of.)
The good (I guess) news is that I can re-download everything I've uploaded to FB, and their technology has improved since last time this happened, so the photos will be much closer to full size. Also, I never delete anything from my phone, and many of the pics (and virtually all the videos) are still on my phone.
At this point I'm trying to have an "it could be much worse" attitude. And DH is currently downloading Aperture and we'll start using that instead of iPhoto. Apparently the file system is much more transparent and it will be way easier for him to put systems in place to back up the folders.
I will still be looking into online hosting. At least until the new iCloud thing is released in September.
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Oh my goodness Michelle I can't believe this happened to you again! Hopefully you can recover most of them back. I must say one of the reasons I always upload to fb is incase I ever lose my photos I know I can at the very least get them back from fb!
Hugs Mama!!
I think it'd be worth taking the bad hard drive to a professional and seeing if they could recover the pics.
And you have a good point about the source data being bad. I would think that no matter where you back up to, if the source data is corrupted, the back up would be too.
There's got to be a solution for that.
And about backing up photos to CDs - CDs degrade over time as well
or at least that's what our disaster recovery guys tell me.
We do this as well. We use Western Digital external hard drives (they come in 2-4 terrabyte options). We also have everything loaded onto Shutterfly just in case too. If I ever want prints I just do it from there.
Sorry, that sucks balls!!