What’s the worst that can happen to a photographer?
Top of that list has to be hard drive failure. This happened to me, losing around 60% of everything I have shot over the years.
There was no warning, no hints, just one day when I turned on my PC it would not recognise the drive. It was one of those stomach chilling, nausea inducing moments. Rather than panic, I asked a few friends for advice and they took me through some steps to see if the drive could be read. I am not that competent when it comes computers so when I ran out of talent, I took the hard drive to work.
Fortunately they had some pretty decent software that would scan the drive. It took 6 days to find data on the 1TB drive and then a further 2 weeks to recover it. I went through a raft of emotions during this time trying to come to terms with the fact that I might well lose everything. I started to hunt around for a replacement drive and then a back service of some sort. I opted to go for a Western Digital My Cloud
Naturally I felt awful at the fact that I had lost so many images. Frustration soon boiled over into anger which then melted away into despair and regret. I had heard this story numerous times before, it even happened to many of friends. I had no idea when I decided to ignore the warning signs. Ultimately my old external drive gave up the ghost. I guess it had been written to and read from too many times over the year.
For now this is the setup I will use, I will however change my Western Digital Passport
ShootingDave, the blog 
What a dreadful experience for you. You offer great advice to others. I use SeagateMedia as my own cloud server back up, plus the cloud- but have some minor anxieties about potential hacking safety risks in the cloud.
I have been through your dead drive experience too, I would rather have a tooth extracted!!! Although my backed up work is training and coaching materials and some photographs, I am self employed, so it cost me a pretty sum to retrieve what I could through a computer whizz kid. Not all was retrievable sadly.
In addition, I replace leads and USB sticks from time to time & like my car, I take it for a service from time to time.
I hope you never lose another of your amazing photographs. You are talented and it is a damn shame that any of your work has been lost..
Great post, thanks.
It is just never easy and never fun. Backup systems seem to pray on this too with cost of purchasing said systems amounting to a small fortune. Routinely swapping out components is a good tip.
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