Tell me all is not lost. Help needed.

[JM Tran]

Sorry to not get back sooner, have been on a flight to sunny work, oh well.

I tried THREE bloody USB 2 cords/leads last night, and low and behold, the last one worked and the HD released all my files, So releaved is an understatement.

Can anybody provide a good back up method>>

AK83, This is one Roosta, that'll never lay all it's eggs in the on bloody basket again.

Thanks so much so all your input.

haha a good back up method.....that would depend first on your budget Roosta

for affordability a RAID 1 array is not too expensive and setting up a few drives to mirror each other - is hard to beat for data redundancy

other steps people take besides mirroring is physical protection such as fire proof cases, and leaving it in external locations like Rick mentioned.

On top of my RAID 1 set up, I swear by my Solid State Drives - using them over the last 2 years in hazardous environments around the world and with the macbook pro getting dropped, used upside down or sideways, enduring a lot of environmental and physical factors - it has never failed me, a normal HDD would have been mechanically damaged the way I use it to do work.

So really, backing up/data redundancy is quite a personalized thing, there is no one absolute best method to do it as everyone has preferences and budget to work around. But backing up means there always has to have at least 2 of the same item at any given time, and for me these days 3 is the minimum

[arthurking83]

I think I understand where JMT is going with the SSD comments, but in effect it has nothing really to do with data backup, in a real world environment.

SSD are great, yet still unproven for long term data backup or archival purposes, but more importantly is price.
There is simply no comparison between the ability of a magnetic disk hard drive compared to a SSD when price is taken into account.

Most of us that archive and protect our data are doing so with raw images, as well as TIFFs and JPGs, so to set up a series of SSDs as a backup/archival destination is only a solution for the mega wealthy(or seriously silly!! ).

I've thought of replacing the hard drive in my Tablet with an SSD(hard drive is a 2.5" Toshiba 320G), but the cost effective fast SSDs are all in the 128G range, and any more than that, and we're looking at the cost of the tablet to replace the hard drive with an SSD! Not really cost effective.

Oh! and those smaller portable 1.8 or 2.5 inch type hard drives, are quite hardy too. While they aren't guaranteed not to get damaged in a fall, I can only imagine what my kids had done to the tablet to cause the large dent in the lower bezel .. obviously dropped, dinged or fought over at some point. But still no problems with the hard drive.

I'm with Jackie on the concept of three copies of an important data backup too.

While my photos are super important to me, even more importantly are my accounting files/data where I use Quicken to manage them, as well as a spreadsheet.

These files are also in triplicate over my entire network, such as PC's, or storage drives or any other storage repository, but also on my USB thumb drives kept with me and in the top drawer. I think I have about 5 or 6 different locations for these even more important files.