The woes of losing a hard drive…

It could have been worse I suppose. Last Friday one of my external hard drives became corrupted and it was impossible to read files from it or communicate with it. After several abortive attempts to read the data from it, John eventually resorted to the Windows checkdisk utility which was all very well and it did find tens of thousands of images and file fragments but it renamed them all so that they were not easily identifiable.

We all know that eventually it’s going to happen! As sure as eggs is eggs a hard drive will eventually fail and it never picks the most convenient time to do it. What was on the drive? Well, all my document and audio visual file backups and 28,000 of my original personal RAW picture files from the last few years. The vast majority of the 28,000 personal image files are backed up on another drive and on DVDs. But I reckon I have lost upwards of about 1,000 picture files (out of a total of 126,000 on various drives). They may not be anything too important, though I do know that a 5 day holiday in Northumberland was on that drive and no-where else.

I think I can retrieve the files, given patience and time, but it just goes to show how important backing up everything is!

I now have a new hard drive and am in the middle of making new back ups of the RAW files before I embark on trying to find the 1,000 or so missing files to plug the gap.

Worst comes to the worst? I’ll just have to get out with my camera and take some more!!!