# Backup, backup, then backup again!



## Shaky (May 21, 2004)

My hd recently failed on my laptop, thought I had auto backup enabled but apparently not! After installing a new hard drive and restoring all my files I've discovered I've lost every pic I've taken sine November 2013! Trips, games, paid shoots etc......I'm feeling a bit ill right now!
About the only things I can recover from 2014 are low res jpegs I've posted online here and Facebook, but no raw files, no full res images,

So just to reiterate, back up your files then make backups of your backups!!!!!! 


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk


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## stargazer (May 24, 2004)

OHMAN !!!!!!!!! Sorry the read this. I hurt just thinking about this.sad3sm


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

*You might not be screwed*

There are companies that can recover most anything off a disk. They can even take those platters out and put them in another drive and read them. Costly sometimes but if you need the shots you might be able to get them back. Google disk drive recovery for lots of them. I set up a network attached backup with an old computer and software. Its unix based but you don't really need to know unix to use it. Installs off a usb stick. Does all the types of raid. I bought faster disks for my main computer and put the old ones in the nas. Here is the link for the software. http://www.freenas.org/

If you are running 100base T network and put a switch in there for a direct link between your computer and nas and resize the packets to 4K or 8K its really fast.

Griz


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## oc48 (Aug 13, 2005)

Yep. Go with some kind os NAS running raid 1 (disk mirroring) and back the nas up to an external drive. 

I run a synology nas at my house. Great little box.


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

*Had another one*

I bought a Seagate and it was really slow and quit in the middle of long backups. The software was not reliable. Processor too small to get the job done. Then I found freenas. Being an old Unix admin it was very easy for me to get it set up but really its pretty straight forward for anyone actually. Installs on a fresh machine off a memory stick. I took the drives out of the seagate and used those and a couple of others. Put a switch between it and my main machine upped the packet size to 4K and now it flies. Thought I'd be able to do 8K packets but it slowed pretty dramatically when I tried it. Unless everything on your net does the bigger packets you won't get any benefit unless you put the switch in the mix. That way the packets from the machine to be backed up don't have to go through the router and get resized possibly. Gets rid of any bottlenecks due to the router. Normal packets range up to about 1500bytes so 4K is a big jump and its possible you can go to 8K. Look under the adapter settings in networking to set the packet size.

Griz


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## Bubbaette (Apr 10, 2005)

My husband deleted a bunch of picture files and it had been about 6 months before he noticed. I was able to use the following recovery software and was able to get a lot of them back. Might be worth a try. I can't remember if I had to buy the software in order to get the files back or if the free trial worked.

http://www.easeus.com/


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## griz (Jan 9, 2006)

*Several of those*

Files don't actually disappear when they are erased. If the space and inodes that specify that file aren't written over its not that hard to take off the erase flag and read the file. But when a disk goes bad usually it destroys the fat (file allocation table) the pointers to the sectors where the actual file is stored. In this case its much harder to retrieve the files. You have to walk the tree and reconstruct the inodes. When the heads of a drive fail and don't impact the platters you can put the platters in another good drive and read them. Many ways to get the data back all complicated if the drive electronics are shot.

Griz


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