Was talking this past week with my niece, a part-time photographer, who indicated that her hard drive crashed. Because it was making the telltale clicking sound as it futilely attempted to access her files, it appears to be a mechanical failure. And yes, she forgot the cardinal rule of computing: All hard drives eventually fail. Panic! Based upon the size of the drive and number of files, she has been quoted a minimum cost of over $1,200 from more than one data recovery company to salvage her pictures.
Several years ago, I also experienced a failed drive with no working backup and know the feeling of panic thinking everything may be lost. This story made me think back to a post I made almost a year ago after I decided to use Carbonite, an Internet Cloud storage and backup site. Even though I have total piece of mind now that I’m using this program, because it is getting near the end of the year, I decided to go back and review my backup scheme and folders. In doing so, I actually found some folders that I had created over the past 9 months that I had failed to add to Carbonite. Thank you Kristina for this reminder.
I now have more than 300,000 pictures and data files (representing 350GB) backed up to Carbonite’s secure data center. If you want to learn more about this program, read last February’s post Making Photo Backups
