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Hot take: my old hard drive ate 3 weeks of photos and the backup rule nobody told me
So 6 weeks ago my external drive just died on me. No warning, no weird noise, nothing. I plugged it in one night and it clicked a few times and that was it. About 400 raw photos from a wedding I shot in Savannah were on there, plus some logo files for two shops. I almost threw up. What saved me was something a guy at a camera store told me a while back, which is that one copy is not a backup, it is just a single point of failure. I had been treating that drive like it was safe because it was separate from my laptop. It was not. Now I keep one copy on a drive at home, one in a cloud folder, and one cheap drive at my sister's place, and I sleep way better. Turns out sync tools can copy a bad file everywhere too, so the rules matter more than the gear. Does anyone here keep an offline copy way off site, or is that overkill for you?
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rowanw919d ago
How often do you actually swap out that drive at your sister's place? Here is the thing nobody tells you, you have to rotate it or it stops being a backup. I learned that the hard way too. If the drive sits there for a year and you never bring it home and re-sync it, all you are protecting is whatever was on it the day you dropped it off. So I do a swap every couple months, bring the off site one home, update it, take the other one back to my parents' house. It sounds like a pain but it takes like 20 minutes and it has already saved me once when a drive started clicking on me. You are not overthinking it at all, that is the right setup.
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