I’m aware that a large majority of people do not back up their digital image files and it scares me; I really feel badly for someone when I hear that they lost their hard drive and that it took five years worth of family pictures/movies with it!!  For amateur photographers and hobbiests, I always recommend an external hard drive.  They are affordable and easy to use.  They do fail, though.  So either keep your images on your computer’s hard drive AND on the external, or burn a copy of you pictures to DVDs or an online back-up service periodically.

I had an external failure about a year ago.  Luckily I was running two and had mirrored them by copying all my data to both.  It was still scary though, because with my luck, the second was likely to fail before I had a chance to back IT up to a new external!  ;)  After that issue I decided to take the plunge and purchase a NAS device or RAID array.  I settled on a RAID-like array, called a Drobo.  It was a large investment but I figured it would end the constant parade of externals I was always buying as my space needs continue to grow.  I bought four 2gb Seagate Barracuda drives for my Drobo and before long, I was off and running.  I disconnected my externals and happily was living my life.

Until one morning when my Drobo (with over $800 invested in it) wouldn’t mount.  My computer couldn’t read it.  Neither could any of the other PCs in the house.  Terrified, I ordered a new Drobo from Amazon and had it overnighted.  I moved my four hard drives into it and waited….same problem.  It took me several days of online research and several calls to Data Robotics to realize that the issue wasn’t that my files weren’t there, but that the Master File Table (which tells the computer *where* the files are) was corrupt.  I had various options to fix it and tried several, but none seemed to work.  Finally I found a link to a program called ZAR and to my great relief, ZAR was able to (slowly) rebuild the MFT and repair whatever issues my Drobo was experiencing.

My Drobo is working well again and aside from the sidecar files (that store my edits) from my latest sessions being corrupt, I’m back in business and getting caught up.  But, now I don’t really trust my Drobo and have discovered that Data Robotics doesn’t recommend using a Drobo (or any RAID array) for one’s ONLY back-up solution.  For now I’m backing up my back-ups to a couple of 1TB externals I bought in my pre-Drobo days.  Eventually I plan to add a true NAS device for back-up but until then, I’m looking at adding a 3gb internal to my PC as another line of back-up.

Moral of the story, make sure you have at least two copies of any image files (or other files for that matter!) that you value.  Someday you may be glad you did!!