lost thru hike pictures

[stunt man]

i have had 2 computers crash on me before and both times i lost all my pictures. the only pics that really bothered me to lose were my pics from when i was in the military and pics/videos of my nephew as a baby and learning to walk. i was just curious if anyone has ever lost all their pics/videos from a thru cause i know if that happened to me id lose my mind! if so, how did you handle it?

[Spokes]

Data Recovery Wiki.

Good luck.

[Tagless]

Having experienced the frustration of computers crash as well, I put all of our AT thru hike and other important family pictures on DVD. This DVD is kept in a bank (safety deposit box).

With about 8000 songs in iTunes, I also back everything up on an external hard drive from time to time. It would be a bummer to lose all that music.

[Rocket Jones]

External hard drives are incredibly cheap. I back up everything important to one. The key is to use the external as backup only. When you're not backing up to it, put it in its box and up on a shelf. That way, if something fries your PC, the hard drive isn't fried too.

[Del Q]

MOZY

$4.95 per month, backs up daily if you like, easy.

Data recovery companies can get most / all data off "crashed" hard drives, might cost some $$$$$

[FritztheCat]

Agree with Rocket. I got a terabite external hard drive for under $100. Keep all my photos, important documents and a backup of all my iTunes music and videos on there. I haven't even dented the memory yet. Heh.

[Bare Bear]

I used town stops to put the pictures on a CD then mail it home. At home I have the cards from the camera and the CDs and the computer. I sent one complete copy of the last thru to a hiker friend and she sent me one complete copy of hers so that if one of us loses them all somehow we are each others backups.

[sherrill]

As others have said, backup. Burn to DVD, external HD, or even a flash drive. 8Gig flash drives are $25 or less, that will hold plenty of low res pics, and you can add to it.

I just bought an external HD enclosure and a 1TB drive with a 5 year warranty for less than $100.

I made the mistake in 1983 of keeping my hike pics, along with the negatives, in my brother's apt, which sadly burned that fall. What I'd give to have them back.

[swash]

I have a 1TB hard drive. Best purchase I've made in a while. I currently have over half of it filled up, and that includes 4 laptops backed up, and all of my blu-ray rip movies (I have a few hundred of them). A 1TB drive only costs $100, and although most people wouldn't even need 500GB it's almost no money to upgrade to a 1TB drive just to have the extra space.

[slugger]

I do some amateur data recovery.

I would suggest looking into the sleuthkit if you have Linux experience.

[WalkingStick75]

Just because your computer "crashes" does not mean the data on the hard drive is gone but if you take it in to a "repair shop" they generally just reload the original image of the drive because that is the easiest way to get the computer in and out of the shop.

Do you still have the hard drives? If you do and the drive is still spinning there is a good chance your pictures are just fine.

[jcramin]

I purchased my first digital camera the day before my sons birth, that was 15 years ago. Since then we have taken close to 40,000 pics.I have a 2nd physical hard drive in my computer where I keep a backup copy of all my pics and I have a external hard drive I back them up too also. I keep t he external hard drive at work between backups.

[rhjanes]

I checked Mozy, Carbonite and one other online/automatice back up. I choose Carbonite and have been very pleased! They don't "delete", even when you do, for something like 24 hours. So accidentially deleted data, can still be recovered. When our old PC died/was dying, We got a new PC. I hooked it up, downloaded all the software and such, got it all up to date and running. Then, logged on to Carbonite and told it "this is my new machine, bring back my data". I manually did some of the small files. The Photos and Music, I told it to recover and went to bed. Next morning, saZAMM, everything was back.

[WalkingStick75]

For those that do not have a high speed internet connect or just like to keep your data closer to home you can also hook up a NAS (network storage) like the dlink 323 which comes with Memeo backup software which automatically saves your data to the NAS.

The one problem with this is that if you have a fire and the NAS is located next to your computer..... you loose. My NAS is located in an out building but then my home network is a little larger than most.

[Wolf - 23000]

stunt man,

I've had many "crashes", helped out friends. There was only once that I was not able to retrive all my data back - The hard drive was dead would not power up. My suggestion is this:

1. DO NOT RELOAD THE O/S ON THE HARD DRIVE!!! The less you put on the hard drive, makes it easier to retrive your data.

2. You can normal retrive your data by booting an O/S off of either a CD/DVD or slave your drive off of another computer and get your data off. Simple copy your information off to another storage media and your good to go.

Another option is take it to Best Buy and have them retrive it. It cost a couple of bucks but as you know some pictures just can't be replaced.

Wolf

[Rain Man]

I have a 2nd physical hard drive in my computer where I keep a backup copy of all my pics and I have a external hard drive I back them up too also. I keep t he external hard drive at work between backups.

Excellent advice on keeping a backup away from home and certainly NOT hooked up to your computer in either case. I lost about a month's worth of my daughter's thru-hike back in '04 when I got a virus (trojan horse?) that maliciously deleted random photos overnight. Most were gone and written over by the time I caught it. Yes, I did have some back-up, but not up-to-date by any means. Now, I have an external hard drive that I leave turned off except for backing up, and another at another physical location.

Uh, I also have excellent virus and malware software these days, updated constantly.

RainMan

.

[bigcranky]

I do photo archiving for a living, so I think I can safely chime in here.

Decent photo archiving requires two different backups:

1. A backup hard drive next to or inside your computer, running some sort of daily backup software. On a Mac, use Time Machine. On a PC, there are numerous programs, not sure what to recommend, but make sure it does incremental backups. This is your first line of defense -- if you delete a file, or have a corrupt photo, or your internal hard drive crashes, it's all on your backup drive.

The main issue with the backup drive is its proximity to your computer -- anything that damages the computer is likely to damage your backup, too -- things like fire, flood, theft, etc. To combat this, you need:

2. An offsite backup. The easiest solution is one of the online companies like Mozy or Backblaze. Cheap, too -- $5 a month for secure offsite storage. A more complicated solution would involve several rotating sets of external hard drives kept at some other location (say, your workplace), bringing one home each week and cloning the main drive. This has the advantage of speed if the main drive crashes -- just pop in the most recent clone and lose less than a week's data. (But you can lose data.)

(One can also burn everything to DVD media, but finding high quality archival media is almost impossible -- maybe the gold DVD media is archival, maybe not, but at $3 per disc I'm not sure it'll be cost-effective for photo collections anyway.)

In any case, the key is to have two backups*, and to start right now. Seriously, go to Mozy or Backblaze or Carbonite right now and download the free trial and start backing up. A few of you will thank me later.


*Why have an external hard drive if you are using Mozy? Two reasons -- it's MUCH faster than downloading gigabytes of data from their servers, and what happens if they go out of business on the same day your computer crashes?

[le loupe]

[QUOTE=bigcranky;1043040]:

2. An offsite backup. The easiest solution is one of the online companies like Mozy or Backblaze. Cheap, too -- $5 a month for secure offsite storage. A more complicated solution would involve several rotating sets of external hard drives kept at some other location (say, your workplace), bringing one home each week and cloning the main drive. This has the advantage of speed if the main drive crashes -- just pop in the most recent clone and lose less than a week's data. (But you can lose data.)

(One can also burn everything to DVD media, but finding high quality archival media is almost impossible -- maybe the gold DVD media is archival, maybe not, but at $3 per disc I'm not sure it'll be cost-effective for photo collections anyway.)
QUOTE]

I second this- My wife is a Court Reporter and has numerous files related to various lawsuits that she is required to maintain for any number of years. Her professional journal had an article on this subject and digital storage via an offsite/web provider was the recommended course.

As I recall, and this may relate to the post above, burning to a CD or DVD is not forever or failsafe.