Seagate or Western Digital are market leaders pretty much, Hitachi is up there. No company has a 100% flawless track-record. Anecdotal evidence of failure saying nothing. You can dig up nightmare stories on any product you'll ever find. That said, Id recommend a portable SSD, like the Samsung ones, Harddrives are vunerable to shocks, vibrations and movement, especially when running. A SSD doesn't have any moving parts so it's a lot more resistant for traveling and the like. It's a lot more expensive too per GB though. Hope that helps.
I made this video (and used this exact title) back in December and posted a preview of it on my instagram Dec 9, 2017*. I did not copy anyone. This video was scheduled for a specific date but I decided to release it early. Thank you guys for your continued support & watching. Love you all.
Have you looked into RAID systems? I think that would be a great solution for you to "backup your backups". I wouldn't be confident with just cloud storage and extra hard drives if it were my livelihood. Good luck, I just discovered your channel and I love it!
the only logical reason why jessica and mango street released a video on the same day with the same topic is because this is the universe telling us to back up our files. BACK UP YOUR FILES PEOPLE!!!!
I've been doing IT for 25 years. $3000 for expedited service on a 3TB is pretty normal. You'll find places that advertise for a lot less, but when you start pushing for a fast turn around the price goes way up. 1. If you have to have a backup drive, don't travel with a spinning hard drive. Use an SSD hard drive instead. 2. Data is NOT backed up if it is just on an external drive. It is only backed up IF you have TWO or more copies of every file in TWO different places. It is just copied to another drive, not backed up if you put a file on an external drive. One copy on your working machine or a work drive plugged into the desktop/laptop, one copy on an external drive, one copy online -- that is well backed up. Amazon online storage is pretty fast for me with my internet for some reason, but I also have files on Google and Dropbox. 3. Rather than copy them to a drive while traveling, just have a ton of memory cards for your camera and don't delete the cards until you get back home (this only works if you are organized and not prone to losing things). Then you have an exact original copy on your cards, and a copy on your travel laptop/drive where you were working with them, and hopefully on your online storage too. 4. If you have a camera with two memory card slots, have the camera send the RAW files to the better card/slot and a JPEG copy to the second card. Then if the camera or the first card fails you still have the JPEGs on the second card. You can get A LOT of JPEGs on the second card so you can potentially "back up" an entire trip to JPEG on one card.
Yeah @GoAttack! I know a company that lost someone's drive and their insurance had to pay the customer, not sure how much. Then they actually found the drive and she was like uh-uh I'm keeping the money lol My wife's friend had her laptop in for service once and they dropped her drive and she didn't do anything -- I told her she should have made them send it in for recovery but she was too nice. I put it in the freezer for a couple days and it came back to life just barely long enough to get her kid's pictures off -- I didn't think that would work but the internet was actually helpful for once :)
@@JoshuaBoldt i was wondering if ssd is stronger (in terms of survival) compared to hdd? I red something about ssd having worse time when its corrupted. Please enlighten me! Cheers
Everyone in the comments talking about Mango street..People can experience similar things and tell their own story!We support you Jessica! Thanks for making this video.
Oh god girl, I hope this NEVER happens to anyone again. You were so professional still and managed to push through and have a great time with us in Australia. Come back soon ❤ (I don't wanna have anymore Hard drive funerals LMFAO)
Why are people so quick to create drama where there isn't any? You cannot film and edit a video of this quality in less than 3 hours. Clearly Jess released this video early to avoid the exact claims everyone is making. Ideas are not copyrighted. Content is. This is Jessica's original video and original story.
Rosa Boer AGREEEEEED!! Two of my favorite UA-camrs talking about the same topic shows the pure importance of it and it’s obviously that common if they both make a video related to the topic!!
I used to work at a photography studio and the first thing we did, was back up every photo session on a blank dvd. then we did our processing off of the hard drive and then backed up some of the processed and retouched images on another DVD and filed everything away. There we a few hard drives that died on us for no reason so there were times that we had to work off the original shots and re-retouch everything (if we hadn't burned the edited discs). Pain in the butt, but it definitely saved our butts a few times. Keep your chin up girl. Thanks for sharing!
Warning About DROPBOX. I had a dropbox account but hadnt used it in a while. So when i went to sign into my account the other day. I got a message that it was DELETED due to inactivity. Like WTH? It doesnt matter how long I go. Those are my files and I should be able to access them whenever. They did say they may be able to recover my files but that didnt sound too promising. Smh
I remember getting an email from them saying that I hadn't used my account in over two years and had to sign in within 30 days to keep it active. I guess they were trying to clear out some server space by culling inactive accounts.
Haleema Nur They are YOUR files stored for free on THEIR servers. And if your computer is properly setup with Dropbox, it should connect to Dropbox everyday. I really don’t see a problem with Dropbox. This is a none issue. Any free service will shut down an account after a year or two of inactivity.
Also, Dropbox isn't a backup, because it doesn't protect you from user error. Accidentally delete all files in your dropbox folder? Deletions are happily replicated to the rest of your devices. Make sure you have a legit backup solution. A copy of everything on multiple devices.
this is one of the most educational video's i've seen on this channel. it feels very genuine and i'm happy to hear my hard drive isn't the only one to crash.
Jessica , you have been my favorite photographer for almost 2 years now and I look up to you and your creativity. Although I am soooo sorry this happened to you, I am glad you are sharing with us that nobody is perfect and mistakes do happen. I unfortunately wasn’t able to retrieve my files from my broken hard drive back in July but, like you, I was able to learn a very important lesson. Thank you for sharing 💕
I was in a photography school in Brussels. For my Senior Thesis in photography,i had to take and print about 15 pictures about one theme,and do a little exposition.I was doing a photo reportage about a farm,and so i had to shoot there frequently. 2 months from my senior thesis,just after a GREAT shooting session,i put everything on my computer,and delete all from my memory card because i needed space to shoot something else. Two or three days later,my computer just crashed,and the guy from the informatic shop succeed at restore it all,exept the photos of this amazing photo session at the farm. I get back to the farm to take new pictures to replace the others,but they weren't as good at all.The teachers told us to ALWAYS BACKUP, but i had not enough money to buy one hard drive A few years later,i learned the lesson and get an hard drive. That summer, a web magazine about music hired me to take pictures at one festival. I wasn't paid,but they paid for the expense (food and drink tickets,entrance at he festival etc..). I shoot and I take really great pictures of the artists,i frequently backup on my hard drive.The festival ends,i come back home and start editing.Then i go to sleep. A few days later,i finally have time to edit the rest of the pictures of the festival,but when i plug my hard drive, the same thing happend that for you. The pictures were just gone forever . I looked soooo unprofessional,and they never hired me again. BACKUP YOUR BACKUPS,she's right.
The easiest solution for this would be to invest in a NAS (Network attached storage) device with multiple hard drive bays. There is a Buffalo branded device you can buy for about 100 USD which takes four drives. You save files to multiple drives at the same time and when full, you store them separately and if one dies, you always have a backup. You can also use it as cloud storage so you can read and write to it remotely.
Watched this and the mango street video, now I’ve saved $5700 Edit: I don’t think Jessica copied mango street tho, anyone can talk about backing up data, and it’s not possible to make a copy w/in an hour right after the mango street video was uploaded. Still enjoyed both this and the mango street video and a huge fan of both!
Always assume you WILL need a backup. Three is Two (one fails = only two left) Two is One (one fails = you have the only backup) One is none (one fails = your data is gone) This applies not only to backups but also different mediums (HDD, SSD, cloud) and different locations (at home and elsewhere). For example, it's no good to keep three HDD backups in your home office if your apartment floods or catches and they're all gone anyway. In that case, your backups weren't backups at all.
I'm so grateful that you posted this. I'm a pro photographer, but i think much like you and other young photographers i haven't thought of everything, and i've got a little complacent with how I feel about my hard drives in my day to day routine. l just realised i haven't even bought cases for them all, like i didnt even think of that and i have thought of so much other stuff to do that is not as important as that. I'm gonna sort the crap out of my hard drives and create mirrors because i can't allow myself to have another catastrophic mistake like the one in 2013 where i managed to leave my camera on a bus and never got it back
It's honestly crazy to see how many professionals don't do this...it's like #1 of being a professional photographer. Granted a lot of pros don't even use cameras with dual card slots so they don't even think about it being a problem to take care of their hard drives too. Im sorry to say but Im glad this happened to you b/c It could have failed at a worse time with a multi thousand dollar shoot and not been recoverable. So good it happened now and you recovered your photos and were able to learn from it in a way it didn't hurt your business. Everyone else, hard drives are cheap, buy two and take 30 seconds to do the backup again. If you have the funds to buy a raid box (holds 2+ drives and mirrors them) then do that, entry level ones are $350-$500 and will save you hassle later. If a drive fails just pop out the bad one and pop in a new one and it will repopulate all the data again.
I swear she could do stand up if she needed a side gig. She's always back at it with the jokes she's got jokes for days! On a serious note i double back up(ssd) and encrypt everything.
Yesssssssss her personality made me subscribe. She's not cocky acting like some others I watch. She's just Jessica and I love that about her! Oh and yes I'd listen to her stand up😂
It will sound stupid but use DVDs, they last way longer than a traditional mechanical drive. Never panic, especially if your drive shows up (ik it's not her case), if you don't know what you're doing then don't do anything and bring it to a professional, googling how to recover data is fine and dandy when you have some basic understanding but you might end up screwing things even more. Deleting and formating a drive is almost 100% recoverable if you don't overwrite the files, stop using it and immediately install (on a different drive...) a data recovery software (recuva, test disk).
I think the most important tip is I'd you're going to travel with a HDD, make sure it's a Solid State Drive (SSD). There's no moving parts so it's a lot harder for them to become damaged, a lot harder. They're basically big USB flash drives. There are plenty of rugged versions available too making them almost indestructible.
it's a coincident..mango street posted couple hours ago...no-one can copy and post another one at this short time period....scripting, recording, editing...it's a long process....
This video and title were created December 8, 2017 and then later uploaded Dec 17, 2017. I just had it scheduled for a while. Yes it's quite a coincidence. Thanks for watching!
UGH it's the WORST thing to happen. I have had the worst luck - THREE of mine have stopped working in the last year and a half. But I've learned now the hard way to keep my stuff in 2+ places !
I literally have been through that recently. Traveling in South Africa, and suddenly my hard driver stopped working. It contained all my photos and videos of 8 months of travel. I visited my brother in December and planned to back up everything there, but i didn't. Hope people listen and do not commit the same mistakes - it hurts!
Jes, I feel your pain. That sinking horror. The realization that you've lost so much, and there's nothing you can do. I lost a brand new hard drive that I was using to make a single, unified copy of every piece of work is ever done. I took my drive to a specialist, and he told me my platters were so scratches that even the FBI wouldn't be able to get my files back. I lost a decade of work. All my music. All my movies. All my web design. All my photography. It is still, to this day, six years later, feel the horror of losing my whole digital life. I now back up to a hard drive, and anything super important goes to my server as well. I also have my devices insured. It's a scary scary thing.
Doesn’t really matter what kind of drive you use, they all fail. Backup isn’t backup unless you, at minimum, have 3 backups, across 2 different mediums, and have 1 offsite. Offsite doesn’t have to be cloud based but is easier- if you rely on swapping drives with friends etc, you’re more likely to get lazy or forget. Dropbox isn’t a great solution, it’s slow and more sync than backup and can get expensive. You could use the free unlimited image backup with Google - sure they’ll be downsized but it’s free and an added offsite copy. I personally replicate to a 4 bay raid array NAS and offload that to Backblaze - any really important or sensitive documents will be encrypted and replicated across several sync platforms like tresorit, Dropbox, and OneDrive.
HUGE THANKS FOR MAKING THIS VIDEO! Was literally thinking about getting a back up hard drive for my back ups this week! Need to do it. My MacBook hardrive failed out of nowhere last year and I had to pay a hefty fee to get it all fixed and updated/upgraded so I couldn't afford to buy the new lens I wanted! Got it now though wooo wooo!! Love your videos and your work Jessica! You're my fave!
I prefer Backblaze for my offsite storage. It’s cheaper, offers unlimited data, and it will search out what’s changed on your system and attached drives rather than you having to find everything and drag and drop. As at least one other person mentioned, an SSD is more durable. Even if you aren’t traveling with them, good quality SSDs will outlast hard disks and, since you are traveling with it, it’s just that extra peace of mind. They aren’t as prone to things like impact damage, etc. Still a good idea to put it in a case though. And, it’s worth it to consider something like a Pelican waterproof case. SSDs are more expensive, but they also speed up your workflow. All of my critical data that I back up locally is on at least three drives. For my system SSD, I have it backed up to three external HDDs. My photo and video catalog drive, which is what I use for more storage and don’t usually work from it, I have backed up to a portable external drive and a desktop external drive. My entertainment drive, which is just movies and TV shows, I have backed up to just one external drive. To perform my backups, on my Mac, I use an application called SuperDuper! that will make full clones of the drives and, by having the paid version, will seek out the data that has changed since my last backup so that the process goes pretty quickly as long as I’m performing the backups on a regular and frequent basis. My process, after a shoot, as much as possible anyway, is to transfer the RAW files to the internal SSD, transfer them also to my catalog drive, and back up my catalog drive to at least one of the backups before I even start doing anything at all with the photos. When I travel, I carry my laptop, a backup drive for it, my catalog drive, and a backup drive for that and leave the other set of backup drives at home. I also try to leave all the image, video, and audio files on their media cards, unless I absolutely have to reformat a card to reuse it. It’s also a good idea to use cameras with dual slots, make backups as you capture, and, ideally, hand off the backups to someone else you’re traveling with, or, at the very least, carry them in a bag separate from your other copies. That way, anything new is given an additional layer of protection since it isn’t with the backups at home. My drives are also on planned cycles of replacement. Even if they’re still fully functional, I don’t wait until a drive has failed to replace it. Depending on the particular drive, how heavily it’s used, how heavily it’s traveled, etc., I generally only use drives that are older than 3 years as redundant backups, with the exception of SSDs. Spinning disk drives slow down as they age and the capacity becomes inadequate anyway, so 1-3 year replacement cycles is what I try to go with. Also, largely because my RAW files are enormous, I’ll do all my culling and editing from the internal SSD in my laptop. Especially when traveling, that’s handy so it can serve as more backup still. My systems work for me and my workflow. Maybe they wouldn’t work for yours, but the key is to actually have a system. Work it out so that everything is easy to manage. Within a few mouse clicks, I can initiate a backup. The easier that stuff is for me to do, the more likely I am to actually follow my schedule. If I have to search out things on my own, I’m much less likely to do it as often. That’s another thing I love about Backblaze; you can just leave it running constantly in the background and, once you’ve set it up and make sure it’s set to constantly run, it just handles everything for you.
I had this happen to me and can I say don't rely on a back up hardrive. I had two and a computer all break on me at once. I bought a NAS system and upload everything online as much as possible.
I feel for you. I have unfortunately lost my files many times through drive failure. I always forget after a few months to back up my back ups! And then another drive will fail. Cloud servers are ok but they sometimes don't store the whole file and only store a small jpeg file. Any good ideas let me know as well please. Love your videos Jessica, you are so beautiful. :-)
Get a raid system, it's weird that some people call themselves professionals like her for example but don't do basick backup or have multiple drive system like cheaper RAID versions.
This is very unfortunate but an excellent story to share. And, you managed to actually recover the files. I've had instances where entire drives worth of valuable data are just gone. So a costly lesson. I think the main take away, which I got from my last critical hard drive crash experience is that these things have a life expectancy, like hands down hard drives do not live forever. And you really have to factor in the cost of redundancy in your business as a photographer to safely protect your hard work and investments. For example, since my last crash, i have never bought a single hard drive again... i've bought two each time. Setup an automatic backup protocol for when the drives are plugged in and no matter what happens to one, you always have the other. Thank you for sharing this valuable lesson.
IDK. - For odd reasons I had 3 "C:" drive SSDs bitching so far. - One of them seems close to unusable the others "better", but not convincingly reliable. - Are all your memory cards still working? - If not: Why do you believe in SSDs? One of mine died for sure. The only use case where you NEED(!) SSDs mechanically is operating them on vibrating bumping vehicles. My microdrive died quickly but the usual desktop / laptop HDDs seem reasonably reliable. There is unfortunately no perfect backup medium. Better rely on mass instead of class. Why does a travelling photographer lug an external drive around at all? Memory cards became quite affordable, modern cameras have 2 slots, the crummiest Android device seems ready to take a 128GB Micro SD to serve as another backup. I recall a time when photographers backed up to HDDs in fear of card failures & issues. What would make SSDs more reliable than cards?
The day my 1TB harddrive started making the ticking noise was heartbreaking... 😭 Now I use 3 different ones. By the way, what kind of lighting do you use for these videos? (Been staring into your eyes to figure it out 😂)
First, thanks for your video, I really like the way you make them, you're super honest and natural. I really enjoy this. Once, I had a problem with 6 drives in a RAID5 array, it did cost me 3k, diagnostic was free (OnTrack, super pro). With one drive I think it should be 1.5k. Anyway, one important thing is that hard drives are mechanically fragile, therefore you should use SSDs for travel, and *forget completely* about HDD. The backup (with another drive or/and in the cloud) is another different point, important too. I had later my 2nd backups on a HDD that was sleeping (but plugged, inside the computer) most of the time, and it died being few years old, after I started to use it every day. One week later my third backup drive (6TB seagate enteprise capacity) died ! All that happened without any shock or travel. Everything safe, protected behind an UPS (FSP). Thanks to the 1st backup, I didn't loose anything, but that was scary. Fortunately, I learned that HGST HDD are the most reliable of all, and I'll use them in the future, in RAID6 array (I can have up to 2 drives broken without data loss), and have the main storage on SSDs, which don't die. However, this does not protect from ransomwares, therefore, I'm considering another backup, offline, with tapes, in a WORM (write once, read multiple times) configuration. And you put those tapes in another place, so in case of theft, fire, water disaster, you're still OK. If the data are important, then that's the best practices ! Cheers
I bought my MacBook Pro when it was a year old. Within the first six months of having it, it failed, they covered it. Probably three weeks later, it failed again. They covered it. All in all, it probably failed 5 times FOR THE SAME THING. I always back everything up since that first fail. If it fails again, knock on wood, I hope Apple just gives me a new computer. You think they would have after it failing 5 times for the same thing and for them "fixing" it, but no. Lol, I understand though. I'm just hoping it never happens again.
It's so frustrating when something like this happens, and there is such a strong feeling of helplessness. Thank you for sharing your experience and thoughts with your community. People can hear geeks say "backup, backup, backup" all the time, but the message is much stronger when it comes from a more "typical" computer user. I understand the reaction to this is "backup a bunch", though this has to be balanced with what each of us will be able to do on a regular basis. If we choose a process which is too complex, it will likely fail. For most non-professional photographers, I think 2-3 copies is a good balance. The most important thing is to be cautious and do *something*.
She's right. We should always have backups. I'm taking programming classes at school. This year our school got hacked and we lost a lot of data. I was the only one in class who had a backup of my work and I am so glad about this because otherwise I would have lost most of my programming projects and I would have had to redo all of my current projects.
The same thing happened to me! It completely discouraged me from taking on any new projects. I still feel like a failure because of it. But thank you Jesse for making this video because I didn’t think this happed to other photographers.
PC + external hdd/keep it on SD cards + cloud should be just fine. I would always suggest cloud or even two clouds instead of HDDs - it will be more expensive, but if somebody steal (or you somehow damage it) your backpack, you can loose 2 HDDs and PC at the same time. And all three backups are gone instantly.
You AND mango street getting me today for not doing a good job at backing up my hard drives. It’s true though, it’s something in the back of my mind that I’ve always been scared of. Thanks to you guys I’ve just invested in backblaze for online storage and I’m spending the day tomorrow updating my back-ups across all 4 of my drives. Thanks for the reminder!
I lost all my photography work two years ago, I was backing up some files on the hard drive and the lights just went off in my house. When I turned on again the computer, same history as yours... my drive wasn’t appearing in my home page, I found a way to fix the drive and recover my files, but 75% of them were damaged and have a different name. I know how you felt, great video.
Interesting....Mango Street posted earlier today that they experienced an experience similar to this two years ago and they used the same title...just a little less expensive loss. BACKUP in several different places and ways. :)
I made this video back in December and posted a preview of it on my instagram early January. It was scheduled for a specific date but I decided to release it early. Thanks for watching
I just figured one of the companies mentioned was sponsoring these videos, but the Mango Street video and this one talk about using different strategies, hardware and cloud services. I’m going with coincidence, but it’s interesting to see two versions of the same topic close together AND the cross linking probably brought more views and subscribers to both!
This video was not sponsored in any way by any company. It is required by law to state if someone is sponsoring a video/product in a video and that is not the case here. Thank you
OH MY GOD! I have no idea what I would have done if this happened to me. I literally have my life in my hard drive! I don't think people would understand your frustration and helplessness unless their job was literally in a little box... I so feel for you and now I'm definitely backing all my files up. Thankyou!!! x
Don’t worry with your fine self lol. I lost my files while in Vegas and downloaded an app for Mac that allowed me to recover files that were deleted. I know that’s now the same as a mechanical issue but it still sucked! That’s an expensive issue so I hope you’re using SSD from now on! Keep up the great work.
Scott Miller what app did you purchase??? I’m dealing with the same issue and want to know if there are reliable apps out there that can help with this
I used Rescuepro but as I just looked back I realized my issue was on an SD card and not a hard drive. It might be worth a try, though. I paid like $40.
A professor once said that data doesn't exist unless it resides on three different medium. As a bit of a techie myself, (as well as hobbyist photographer) I'd like to help wherever possible. If cloud storage isn't feasible (due to internet availability or long term cost because raws add up quickly) or you just want absolute control, having a home storage server is an idea for the raw archive rather than relying upon the workstation. File systems such as ZFS are purpose-made for allowing the tolerance of drive failures without jeopardizing data. Additionally, you also should consider some form of cold (offline) storage for your archive, preferably in a remote location. The cold storage will protect you from malware (particularly ransomware) and destruction of the home. Cloud storage can be used for a permanent archive as well if cost and internet are not issues, but it should not be connected to all the time due to aforementioned ransomeware risk (some vendors may provide protection for this though). Data storage is really a bit of a science in itself, as you need to fit the individual's or business' needs for the future without excessive expense now. A portable drive should be used for current projects. For photography, a portable SSD would make sense due to the speed and sufficient storage (512GB can be had inexpensively) for most individual outings, as well as some factor of physical durability. Portable drives should not be used for primary long term storage. Further, carry no less than two. Finally, all drives can fail suddenly, both SSD and HDD, regardless of how they're cared for. While avoiding drops reduces the chances of failure, I would strongly recommend not spending money on cases or anything else to protect the drives beyond organization purposes. The money spent here would be better put to a more robust storage solution.
I lost a whole year of family photos (all my client work was backed up) when one of my hard drives failed. I still have it and want to try and recover what I can when I have the money. I’m so happy that I printed what I did so those memories aren’t completely lost.
While I was in school, I carried my hard drive EVERYWHERE with me and the backup right beside it. I unfortunately got lazy and stopped backing up my main drive during my second semester and my hard drive flakes out on me just as you had said. I tried everything and nothing worked. Fortunately I had almost everything backed up but a few months after that, my BACKUP was having problems and saying it was blank and I didn’t have a new backup at that point (because broke college student) I got so lucky and my hard drive just needed a few days and it worked but I sure as hell went out and got a different brand of hard drive for my new backup and have been backing up as much as I can. It is a NIGHTMARE to lose a hard drive you have not backed up. Lots of tears were shed in those situations. I couldn’t agree more with all the tips you gave, and I’d also add, keep your daily hard drive and backup in different locations in case there was a fire or something. That way they both don’t go down and you have the other one safe in another location. Thank you for this video Jessica. It’s a harsh reality to face but it is so important to be careful, especially when such a small and delicate thing hold so much of our lives! I hope nothing like this ever happens to you again!
I feel for you! This happened to me years ago in art school with all the photography work I needed to be graded the next day. The cost was 2500 to be fixed back then and that was in NYC. Luckily my professor saw a preview of my work the week before and loved it, but since then I learned you backup a backup for sure. Thanks for sharing.
Macarena Ibsen I really don’t think it’s a scripted ad, it’s the law to state if your video is sponsored, both the videos are different and, as she wrote in the pinned comment, she made the video last month.
Hi Jessica, I could recommend a portable SSD just for travel. It doesn't need to be a 1tb drive, but just enough to get you going abroad. SSD doesn't have moving parts so it won't fail mechanically.
If your hard drive makes a noise and won't mount, immediately stop trying to do anything with it. It's physically broken and you're probably making it worse. If you want to try to resurrect it, try shipping it to Seagate's hard drive data retrieval. It's expensive, but a whole lot less expensive than $4000 US. It's about $500 per drive, last I checked.
I have about 9 drives at the moment and I have a drive that's specifically for travel and is a smaller size drive as well, as it's not being used to store large amounts and then many of the JPEGs of the images I want are stored on Smugmug. In my career I've had one drive fail in a desktop of mine a few years ago. Fortunately I had majority of it backup. I did lose a few things, but nothing really important that I was crying about. My main thing was having my main images and having my Lightroom Catalog backed up.
Hi! I understand your concerns. I actually made this video (and used this exact title) back in December and posted a preview of it on my instagram Dec 9, 2017*. It was scheduled for a specific date but I decided to release it early today. Thanks for watching x
You expect her to know that a video that takes time to make, edit, and upload, is going to be on the same topic as someone else's who posted 1 hour ago? Come on. Also, not everyone follows mango street. So I can watch Jessica's video without a problem.
That's the thing, I don't have to watch both videos. I hope you support some of this youtubers personally via patreon if you are expecting them to never touch a subject someone else has already discussed.
I totally understand where you’re coming from same thing happened to me. And I learned the hard way, now I have a protective case and I have a back up for my back up .You live and you learn right.
Jessica Kobeissi sorry... Just an observation... I know you couldn't have watched theirs and made a whole video the same in like 3 hours... Didn't mean to annoy you 😔
Jessica Kobeissi I totally understand that and I think everyone else who didn't will when they see your instagram story bout it. Glad I didn't offend you or whatever ☺️ this has happened to me so many times also... My macbook pro seems to break every 10 minutes and I never back up...😂 bit late for New year New me I guess 😂
Tom...thing is I don’t know who mango street is and don’t care. We are Jessicas peeps here. Not like she went and created the story ..geez what an inappropriate comment. She’s too classy to tell you off.
I think that the tech was on the right page, pull the HDD out of the casing and try a different cable / power supply. the alternative is to get a spare HDD that is a SSD model. Try smaller drives so that you don't keep so much work on one drive.. but that's just my two cents.
Fist I want to say I’m sorry... I can only imagine your frustration and the feeling of loss you must have felt seeing all your hard work completely disappear right before your eyes. 😧💔 PAINFUL Last year around July or September my Android Note 4 cell phone 📱 completely died on me. It worked in the morning and by the afternoon it completely shut down, wouldn’t turn on, and it just simply died. I lost my contacts and some other info I had on the phone but thankfully I did have my pics backed up. Thanks for sharing this important reminder to us!! I am sure you will create more amazing content in the year/s ahead that will compensate a little for your lost work. I sure it will still be painful to think about but at least you have some of your beautiful pics on Instagram 👍🏻 send you a hug and i think your work is AMAZING. You’re such an inspiration! 💛
I would suggest having a NAS and set it up to copy stuff to the cloud, and do DVD or blu ray disks of the files. The NAS will give you that direct and personal storage and having it back up a cloud service will help it back up any files you want backed up.
I had a similar experience where my hard drive stopped working after accidentally being dropped, luckily I had backed it up on another drive. A week later my backup hard drive stopped working too and there was no sign of recovery! It had EVERYTHING on it. All my memories, my work etc. Honestly so gutted.
Holy hell !! 4K !!?? I downloaded a recovery software for $100 bucks and recovered 75 percent of all my files I must have been so so lucky.. I guess if I had the money I would have spent the money to have professionals fix it. I’m glad you got your photos back !! You have been a big inspiration to me and influence your in my photography I’ve only been shooting 1 year and I’m not any where near as good but you are the reason I’m trying to make this career for once I found my passion and the one thing I want to do for the rest of my life !
Backing up my back ups has been in the back of my mind for a long time, but I always convinced myself it was overkill. Your experience has made me think again.
I feel for ya. Tech breaks, often from no fault of our own. But sometimes it is. I drowned my first brand new 5Dmk4 by not properly sealing the underwater housing it was in. Luckily at least the lens survived.
Recently I bought 6x6Tb drives, and 3 of them are duplicates of the other 3, i have seperate drives for time machine backups as well; it’s so important for people to know that hard drives have a life span and hard drives are relatively cheap! My iMac hard drive died the other day, and I was able to replace it with a new SSD, for under $200 AUD, the time machine backup restored the computer to the most recent backup and its now faster than before :D backblaze is a really good system - they backup your entire hard drive for $5 a month I think and if your hard drive dies they mail you out a new hard drive with the backups which you can either copy to a new hard drive and mail back or pay a small cost to keep the new drive :)
Whenever I go on trips I save the cards and don't format till I'm back home. I go with an empty hard drive and download when I get back to the room and as a 3rd backup I upload to my dropbox overnight while I sleep. So I literally will have 3 versions of the content I shot those days. So I have the cards, portable hard drive and dropbox of the shoot. I then use BackBlaze when I am home to backup all my stuff as an offsite storage area. But that's just my suggestions.
Jessica, I feel for you! I had an external hard drive go bad a few years ago and the files could not be recovered. We lost about 200 hours of graphic design work! It made us sick. But... it was a great lesson. Now we back up everything to a second hard drive, as well as to a cloud service.
after a couple of failures I got a QNAP NAS running RAID (2 mirrored drives) that sits at home and I can upload to remotely, so as long as there is a internet connection, I can back up. Also, I don't delete my SD cards until I get home, even after copying the files over to the laptop, so in case the laptop crashes/gets lost/damaged, I still have the files. If you need a on-the-go backup, in case you're someplace remote, pick up a SSD external drive, not a mechanical one.
Great vid - a cautionary tale! I use Dropbox Plus (2TB) to back up my files. Other options are to get a NAS drive/server; pricey but it gives you a ton of space, + you can swap out NAS drives (3.5" internal HDs), buy/add new ones, and also set it up so you have remote access like you're own private cloud service. Also there's Adobe cloud storage too. After a shoot, I always try to keep my photos or video files on the SD cards for at least a week, back up to an external, plus give a copy to my client for back up. It pays to buy extra SD cards, and yep stick to smaller 1TB drives and get many of them for redundancy. SSD drives are more reliable but they're hella pricey too.
I'm sorry to hear of your issue. We've all had a bad hard drive and I constantly tell people to back up all their data on a regular basis and if they can back up the back up they should do so. Coincidentally, I just purchased a new 8TB Seagate external drive for super cheap this morning. I'm a photography hobbiest and an IT professional. I have 2 solid state and one mechanical drive in my laptop, and a couple of external usb drives. At some point I want to install a network storage device (NAS or Personal Cloud) so that I can access my files from anywhere. In January I had a client lose his hard drive, but I was fortunately able to recover files using software purchased for $129. Still that client has terabytes of files all labeled in sequential numbers that he has to go through. I have working files on a solid state drive separate from my operating system, copies on an external drive, and whole system backups on yet another drive. Plus photo images that I share with others are currently are on Drop Box.
I have a "lacie" hard drive, because it is drop protected. Don't move any hard drive while it's powered on (there are moving parts inside)! At home I have two 2tb drives in my pc and use "Backup Service Home 3" to automatically back up one hard drive to the other every hour. I don't use raid, because if you accidentally delete a photo on one hard drive it's lost on both. It's advisable to make backups to a place other than your home (hard drive at a friends house, cloud, etc.) in case of a fire or flood.
On a couple of occasions, I have gotten a drive with a stuck read/write head to spin up by placing it in the freezer for a couple of hours (inside a ziplock bag to avoid moisture). Take it out of the cold, then plug it in (but leave it in the bag to prevent condensation), and it MIGHT work this time. As soon as it spins up, copy everything off of it, of course, because this is not a long-term fix.
From my filmmaking background: General Structure at Whatever your "HomeBase" is: • Original • Backup of Original that you update as first priority • Backup of Original (kept "offsite"... a friend's house, or at work, etc) which you update once a week or after a major shoot • Cloud backup (if you have the monetary means) *All physical backups are in RAID arrays When on travel: • Original • Backup of Original kept in a different bag (or in a different car if with a crew of ppl, even better if the footage can be on two different flights) • Tertiary backup on the cloud or an additional physical copy is best Your friends are redundancy AND different physical locations of the media. Redundancy is nothing if your bag with all the footage is stolen/lost/home broken into or burned down (god forbid) It gets expensive when you have terabytes from a shoot, but i suggest using a raid style workflow management (all storage media is in a RAID format (physical raid array), or you have a camera that can shoot data to two different cards on the fly (A7Riii)) Cheers!
Recently I’ve lost my hard drive 😭 I never took it out, the last time I remember using it was in my room, but I looked everywhere in the house but cannot find it 😩 and I have thousands of pictures. WORST FEELING, I hope i’ll find it. I’ve also lost my camera bag which had my camera, 2 lenses and 5-6 memory card with lots of images 😢 this was 3 years ago when I was in France, I left it in a train. Jess you’re not the only, it’s the worst feeling, I rather loose money than pictures ☹️😒
I feel your pain. I too lost a harddrive. One of the worst experiences of my life. Cost me $2000... Best money I ever spent and I can assure you, it'll never happen again. BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP!!!!!
Last year I decided to back up my backup and it actually was the best idea ever. I decided to use a NAS and it's the best for my files that I don't need every day anymore. Really recommend this system if you don't want to pay monthly for online storage.
You got good at backing up and online storage, it's a very useful and well-thought video, Jessica. A good replacement of the external HDD is the external SSD, it's a lot faster, smaller, quieter, more stable and rugged, because it has no moving parts, but the price per GB is a lot higher and it has a limited amount of write cycles, like after a few years you need to buy another one, but the catch is that in every second you can see how much life it has left and many times it lives a lot longer than the predicted number of write circles if you get a quality one. After losing many things when Windows 7 got broken out of nowhere and nothing was possible to recover I back up anything important, Dropbox and Google Drive are the most easy to use and share files from them, but Box gives you 50GB of free online storage, but it's a little cumbersome to use. All in all, if you are going to pay for online storage ,get the one you find the easier to use. :)
I remember watching a video just recently about a compact backup hard drive from fStoppers that is quite amazing. Look up the Synology DS416slim. It’s a 4-bay drive that can backup in multiple drives and you can have 2 computers connected to it if you want. I plan on getting one because I ultimately know that cutting corners on costs like backing up can one day cost more to fix.
As she’s talking, I’m over here on Amazon putting another hard drive in my cart 😂
cdozen vlogs $600.00 to recover my Seagate usb drive. Never will buy another Seagate again. My drive wasn't a full year.
AwesomeBlackDude what brand would you suggest?
Seagate or Western Digital are market leaders pretty much, Hitachi is up there. No company has a 100% flawless track-record. Anecdotal evidence of failure saying nothing. You can dig up nightmare stories on any product you'll ever find.
That said, Id recommend a portable SSD, like the Samsung ones, Harddrives are vunerable to shocks, vibrations and movement, especially when running. A SSD doesn't have any moving parts so it's a lot more resistant for traveling and the like. It's a lot more expensive too per GB though. Hope that helps.
lol im doing same thing ! i have WD 8T thinking to get WD 4T just for back up . dont need all 8T to back up
Same here
I made this video (and used this exact title) back in December and posted a preview of it on my instagram Dec 9, 2017*. I did not copy anyone. This video was scheduled for a specific date but I decided to release it early. Thank you guys for your continued support & watching. Love you all.
Don't mind the naysayers. Keep shining bright, Jessica! Also, thank you for sharing your experience. It's VERY appreciated.
Have you looked into RAID systems? I think that would be a great solution for you to "backup your backups". I wouldn't be confident with just cloud storage and extra hard drives if it were my livelihood. Good luck, I just discovered your channel and I love it!
Have you heard of Backblaze? It's $5/month and is a good option for an extra backup.
amazon prime has unlimited storage for images including raw files... take a look, might find it interesting ;)
U r awesome..... n soooooo cute.
the only logical reason why jessica and mango street released a video on the same day with the same topic is because this is the universe telling us to back up our files. BACK UP YOUR FILES PEOPLE!!!!
I've been doing IT for 25 years. $3000 for expedited service on a 3TB is pretty normal. You'll find places that advertise for a lot less, but when you start pushing for a fast turn around the price goes way up.
1. If you have to have a backup drive, don't travel with a spinning hard drive. Use an SSD hard drive instead.
2. Data is NOT backed up if it is just on an external drive. It is only backed up IF you have TWO or more copies of every file in TWO different places. It is just copied to another drive, not backed up if you put a file on an external drive. One copy on your working machine or a work drive plugged into the desktop/laptop, one copy on an external drive, one copy online -- that is well backed up. Amazon online storage is pretty fast for me with my internet for some reason, but I also have files on Google and Dropbox.
3. Rather than copy them to a drive while traveling, just have a ton of memory cards for your camera and don't delete the cards until you get back home (this only works if you are organized and not prone to losing things). Then you have an exact original copy on your cards, and a copy on your travel laptop/drive where you were working with them, and hopefully on your online storage too.
4. If you have a camera with two memory card slots, have the camera send the RAW files to the better card/slot and a JPEG copy to the second card. Then if the camera or the first card fails you still have the JPEGs on the second card. You can get A LOT of JPEGs on the second card so you can potentially "back up" an entire trip to JPEG on one card.
Thank you so so much for all this helpful information! Really do appreciate you sharing your knowledge about the subject with myself and others.
Yeah @GoAttack! I know a company that lost someone's drive and their insurance had to pay the customer, not sure how much. Then they actually found the drive and she was like uh-uh I'm keeping the money lol
My wife's friend had her laptop in for service once and they dropped her drive and she didn't do anything -- I told her she should have made them send it in for recovery but she was too nice. I put it in the freezer for a couple days and it came back to life just barely long enough to get her kid's pictures off -- I didn't think that would work but the internet was actually helpful for once :)
@@JoshuaBoldt i was wondering if ssd is stronger (in terms of survival) compared to hdd? I red something about ssd having worse time when its corrupted. Please enlighten me!
Cheers
Joshua Boldt thanks for the info!
SSD Hard Drive? 😂
20 seconds into the video and i already started to backup all my files hahah
Same thing... backing up now!
Ommmmmmmg saaaame
Damn Me too!!! I got scared they'd crash while I was watching this video
haha
you are legit looking like an angel in the thumbnail just had to say before watching
omg thankkk youuu beautiful! I must come see you soon!!
Soooo tru🙌🏼
Angelic AF
She's legit lookin' like an angel all the time lol
The Loobis How? That's a compliment
Tar mar I agree! I know you commented 2 years ago but I had to come into comments. Her face is just so mesmerizing because her beauty comes naturally.
Everyone in the comments talking about Mango street..People can experience similar things and tell their own story!We support you Jessica! Thanks for making this video.
Zoe Jean its not even that, she made this video couple months ago lol
Right!!
Oh god girl, I hope this NEVER happens to anyone again. You were so professional still and managed to push through and have a great time with us in Australia. Come back soon ❤ (I don't wanna have anymore Hard drive funerals LMFAO)
I LOVE YOU!!!
Why are people so quick to create drama where there isn't any? You cannot film and edit a video of this quality in less than 3 hours. Clearly Jess released this video early to avoid the exact claims everyone is making. Ideas are not copyrighted. Content is. This is Jessica's original video and original story.
I was gonna roast but I saw 112 comments and I was like it's already done
Careless about the OP, this is a technical response to you: this kinda of VLog video takes 10min. to film and 20 min to edit..... be real.
While everyone's complaining about this having the same title as Mangostreets video today, I am just really happy that I get to watch & enjoy both :)
Rosa Boer AGREEEEEED!! Two of my favorite UA-camrs talking about the same topic shows the pure importance of it and it’s obviously that common if they both make a video related to the topic!!
I used to work at a photography studio and the first thing we did, was back up every photo session on a blank dvd. then we did our processing off of the hard drive and then backed up some of the processed and retouched images on another DVD and filed everything away. There we a few hard drives that died on us for no reason so there were times that we had to work off the original shots and re-retouch everything (if we hadn't burned the edited discs). Pain in the butt, but it definitely saved our butts a few times. Keep your chin up girl. Thanks for sharing!
Warning About DROPBOX. I had a dropbox account but hadnt used it in a while. So when i went to sign into my account the other day. I got a message that it was DELETED due to inactivity. Like WTH? It doesnt matter how long I go. Those are my files and I should be able to access them whenever. They did say they may be able to recover my files but that didnt sound too promising. Smh
I remember getting an email from them saying that I hadn't used my account in over two years and had to sign in within 30 days to keep it active. I guess they were trying to clear out some server space by culling inactive accounts.
Oh my god thank you so much for telling us this. You might’ve saved me so much 😭🙌🏼 THIS NEEDS MORE LIKES AND NEEDS TO GET TO THE TOP ASAP
Haleema Nur They are YOUR files stored for free on THEIR servers. And if your computer is properly setup with Dropbox, it should connect to Dropbox everyday. I really don’t see a problem with Dropbox. This is a none issue. Any free service will shut down an account after a year or two of inactivity.
Happened to my MEGA account lol I kept procrastinating for signing in but it's fine there wasn't anything important
Also, Dropbox isn't a backup, because it doesn't protect you from user error. Accidentally delete all files in your dropbox folder? Deletions are happily replicated to the rest of your devices.
Make sure you have a legit backup solution. A copy of everything on multiple devices.
this is one of the most educational video's i've seen on this channel. it feels very genuine and i'm happy to hear my hard drive isn't the only one to crash.
Jessica , you have been my favorite photographer for almost 2 years now and I look up to you and your creativity. Although I am soooo sorry this happened to you, I am glad you are sharing with us that nobody is perfect and mistakes do happen. I unfortunately wasn’t able to retrieve my files from my broken hard drive back in July but, like you, I was able to learn a very important lesson. Thank you for sharing 💕
I was in a photography school in Brussels. For my Senior Thesis in photography,i had to take and print about 15 pictures about one theme,and do a little exposition.I was doing a photo reportage about a farm,and so i had to shoot there frequently. 2 months from my senior thesis,just after a GREAT shooting session,i put everything on my computer,and delete all from my memory card because i needed space to shoot something else. Two or three days later,my computer just crashed,and the guy from the informatic shop succeed at restore it all,exept the photos of this amazing photo session at the farm. I get back to the farm to take new pictures to replace the others,but they weren't as good at all.The teachers told us to ALWAYS BACKUP, but i had not enough money to buy one hard drive
A few years later,i learned the lesson and get an hard drive. That summer, a web magazine about music hired me to take pictures at one festival. I wasn't paid,but they paid for the expense (food and drink tickets,entrance at he festival etc..). I shoot and I take really great pictures of the artists,i frequently backup on my hard drive.The festival ends,i come back home and start editing.Then i go to sleep. A few days later,i finally have time to edit the rest of the pictures of the festival,but when i plug my hard drive, the same thing happend that for you. The pictures were just gone forever . I looked soooo unprofessional,and they never hired me again.
BACKUP YOUR BACKUPS,she's right.
I've two backups for my original files. I've two backup computers as well. If anything goes down, I can continue working the next minute.
EXPLAIN YOUR PROCESS A BIT MORE PLEASE....
Teoh hi!!!
The easiest solution for this would be to invest in a NAS (Network attached storage) device with multiple hard drive bays.
There is a Buffalo branded device you can buy for about 100 USD which takes four drives.
You save files to multiple drives at the same time and when full, you store them separately and if one dies, you always have a backup.
You can also use it as cloud storage so you can read and write to it remotely.
Apollo Mead x
Teoh Yi Chie too much extra work aghhhh
Watched this and the mango street video, now I’ve saved $5700
Edit: I don’t think Jessica copied mango street tho, anyone can talk about backing up data, and it’s not possible to make a copy w/in an hour right after the mango street video was uploaded. Still enjoyed both this and the mango street video and a huge fan of both!
Min Andy Choi lmao 😂 my favorite comment so far 😭🙌🏼
Always assume you WILL need a backup.
Three is Two (one fails = only two left)
Two is One (one fails = you have the only backup)
One is none (one fails = your data is gone)
This applies not only to backups but also different mediums (HDD, SSD, cloud) and different locations (at home and elsewhere). For example, it's no good to keep three HDD backups in your home office if your apartment floods or catches and they're all gone anyway. In that case, your backups weren't backups at all.
Can you do more of the "___ photographers shoot the same model"? I love those series! But I also love the behind the scene
I'm so grateful that you posted this. I'm a pro photographer, but i think much like you and other young photographers i haven't thought of everything, and i've got a little complacent with how I feel about my hard drives in my day to day routine. l just realised i haven't even bought cases for them all, like i didnt even think of that and i have thought of so much other stuff to do that is not as important as that. I'm gonna sort the crap out of my hard drives and create mirrors because i can't allow myself to have another catastrophic mistake like the one in 2013 where i managed to leave my camera on a bus and never got it back
HAHA hard drive backup party!! love it LOL
you're invited to mine!! :D
For a professional I would expect a RAID setup for important and/or sensitive files.
RAID isn't backup but it's a decent way to at least have some redundancy with your data.
It's honestly crazy to see how many professionals don't do this...it's like #1 of being a professional photographer. Granted a lot of pros don't even use cameras with dual card slots so they don't even think about it being a problem to take care of their hard drives too. Im sorry to say but Im glad this happened to you b/c It could have failed at a worse time with a multi thousand dollar shoot and not been recoverable. So good it happened now and you recovered your photos and were able to learn from it in a way it didn't hurt your business.
Everyone else, hard drives are cheap, buy two and take 30 seconds to do the backup again. If you have the funds to buy a raid box (holds 2+ drives and mirrors them) then do that, entry level ones are $350-$500 and will save you hassle later. If a drive fails just pop out the bad one and pop in a new one and it will repopulate all the data again.
I swear she could do stand up if she needed a side gig. She's always back at it with the jokes she's got jokes for days! On a serious note i double back up(ssd) and encrypt everything.
LMAOOO thank you!!!
AYYYY :)
Yesssssssss her personality made me subscribe. She's not cocky acting like some others I watch. She's just Jessica and I love that about her! Oh and yes I'd listen to her stand up😂
I know right!?!?! She is awesome! I love when she goes into her alter ego voice or whatever it's great!
Congratulations on hitting 1K btw!
It will sound stupid but use DVDs, they last way longer than a traditional mechanical drive. Never panic, especially if your drive shows up (ik it's not her case), if you don't know what you're doing then don't do anything and bring it to a professional, googling how to recover data is fine and dandy when you have some basic understanding but you might end up screwing things even more. Deleting and formating a drive is almost 100% recoverable if you don't overwrite the files, stop using it and immediately install (on a different drive...) a data recovery software (recuva, test disk).
I would recommend a portable SSD and if you have Amazon Prime, back it up on Amazon Drive since it's included.
I think the most important tip is I'd you're going to travel with a HDD, make sure it's a Solid State Drive (SSD). There's no moving parts so it's a lot harder for them to become damaged, a lot harder. They're basically big USB flash drives. There are plenty of rugged versions available too making them almost indestructible.
it's a coincident..mango street posted couple hours ago...no-one can copy and post another one at this short time period....scripting, recording, editing...it's a long process....
This video and title were created December 8, 2017 and then later uploaded Dec 17, 2017. I just had it scheduled for a while. Yes it's quite a coincidence. Thanks for watching!
Jessica Kobeissi yeah that's what I was talking about...I saw it on your insta story..
so mango street actually copied Jessica? and she isn't even accusing them of anything. Taking the high road. lol
Even when you talk about serious problems you manage to make us smile...
UGH it's the WORST thing to happen. I have had the worst luck - THREE of mine have stopped working in the last year and a half. But I've learned now the hard way to keep my stuff in 2+ places !
It's the worst thing? I thought getting cancer and living in agony is pretty bad
I literally have been through that recently. Traveling in South Africa, and suddenly my hard driver stopped working. It contained all my photos and videos of 8 months of travel. I visited my brother in December and planned to back up everything there, but i didn't. Hope people listen and do not commit the same mistakes - it hurts!
You are ridiculously pretty
You just noticed that? 😀
Trixie Mattel Is The Best lol you right, been noticed. Keep those up votes coming to increase chances of her seeing 😀😁😆
Mediocre Tutorials and Reviews I mean shes meh, average at best
At least she doesn't make tutorials of how to take iPhone portraits like Jessica Whitaker does
You are so incredibly sweet! Thank you so much!
Jes, I feel your pain. That sinking horror. The realization that you've lost so much, and there's nothing you can do. I lost a brand new hard drive that I was using to make a single, unified copy of every piece of work is ever done. I took my drive to a specialist, and he told me my platters were so scratches that even the FBI wouldn't be able to get my files back. I lost a decade of work. All my music. All my movies. All my web design. All my photography. It is still, to this day, six years later, feel the horror of losing my whole digital life. I now back up to a hard drive, and anything super important goes to my server as well. I also have my devices insured. It's a scary scary thing.
Doesn’t really matter what kind of drive you use, they all fail. Backup isn’t backup unless you, at minimum, have 3 backups, across 2 different mediums, and have 1 offsite. Offsite doesn’t have to be cloud based but is easier- if you rely on swapping drives with friends etc, you’re more likely to get lazy or forget.
Dropbox isn’t a great solution, it’s slow and more sync than backup and can get expensive. You could use the free unlimited image backup with Google - sure they’ll be downsized but it’s free and an added offsite copy.
I personally replicate to a 4 bay raid array NAS and offload that to Backblaze - any really important or sensitive documents will be encrypted and replicated across several sync platforms like tresorit, Dropbox, and OneDrive.
I love photographers that are humble, and can admit they are not perfect!!!! mad respect.
Your mistake was more expensive than mango street. 😞
HUGE THANKS FOR MAKING THIS VIDEO! Was literally thinking about getting a back up hard drive for my back ups this week! Need to do it. My MacBook hardrive failed out of nowhere last year and I had to pay a hefty fee to get it all fixed and updated/upgraded so I couldn't afford to buy the new lens I wanted! Got it now though wooo wooo!! Love your videos and your work Jessica! You're my fave!
I prefer Backblaze for my offsite storage. It’s cheaper, offers unlimited data, and it will search out what’s changed on your system and attached drives rather than you having to find everything and drag and drop.
As at least one other person mentioned, an SSD is more durable. Even if you aren’t traveling with them, good quality SSDs will outlast hard disks and, since you are traveling with it, it’s just that extra peace of mind. They aren’t as prone to things like impact damage, etc. Still a good idea to put it in a case though. And, it’s worth it to consider something like a Pelican waterproof case. SSDs are more expensive, but they also speed up your workflow.
All of my critical data that I back up locally is on at least three drives. For my system SSD, I have it backed up to three external HDDs. My photo and video catalog drive, which is what I use for more storage and don’t usually work from it, I have backed up to a portable external drive and a desktop external drive. My entertainment drive, which is just movies and TV shows, I have backed up to just one external drive.
To perform my backups, on my Mac, I use an application called SuperDuper! that will make full clones of the drives and, by having the paid version, will seek out the data that has changed since my last backup so that the process goes pretty quickly as long as I’m performing the backups on a regular and frequent basis. My process, after a shoot, as much as possible anyway, is to transfer the RAW files to the internal SSD, transfer them also to my catalog drive, and back up my catalog drive to at least one of the backups before I even start doing anything at all with the photos.
When I travel, I carry my laptop, a backup drive for it, my catalog drive, and a backup drive for that and leave the other set of backup drives at home. I also try to leave all the image, video, and audio files on their media cards, unless I absolutely have to reformat a card to reuse it. It’s also a good idea to use cameras with dual slots, make backups as you capture, and, ideally, hand off the backups to someone else you’re traveling with, or, at the very least, carry them in a bag separate from your other copies. That way, anything new is given an additional layer of protection since it isn’t with the backups at home.
My drives are also on planned cycles of replacement. Even if they’re still fully functional, I don’t wait until a drive has failed to replace it. Depending on the particular drive, how heavily it’s used, how heavily it’s traveled, etc., I generally only use drives that are older than 3 years as redundant backups, with the exception of SSDs. Spinning disk drives slow down as they age and the capacity becomes inadequate anyway, so 1-3 year replacement cycles is what I try to go with.
Also, largely because my RAW files are enormous, I’ll do all my culling and editing from the internal SSD in my laptop. Especially when traveling, that’s handy so it can serve as more backup still.
My systems work for me and my workflow. Maybe they wouldn’t work for yours, but the key is to actually have a system. Work it out so that everything is easy to manage. Within a few mouse clicks, I can initiate a backup. The easier that stuff is for me to do, the more likely I am to actually follow my schedule. If I have to search out things on my own, I’m much less likely to do it as often. That’s another thing I love about Backblaze; you can just leave it running constantly in the background and, once you’ve set it up and make sure it’s set to constantly run, it just handles everything for you.
Jonathan Russell I use Backblaze also. It is not cloud storage though. It is cloud BACKUP.
I had this happen to me and can I say don't rely on a back up hardrive. I had two and a computer all break on me at once. I bought a NAS system and upload everything online as much as possible.
I feel for you. I have unfortunately lost my files many times through drive failure. I always forget after a few months to back up my back ups! And then another drive will fail. Cloud servers are ok but they sometimes don't store the whole file and only store a small jpeg file. Any good ideas let me know as well please. Love your videos Jessica, you are so beautiful. :-)
Amazon S3, Amazon glacier
Get a raid system, it's weird that some people call themselves professionals like her for example but don't do basick backup or have multiple drive system like cheaper RAID versions.
I have not heard of Raid, but I will take a look thanks.
Thanks for the tip.
This is very unfortunate but an excellent story to share. And, you managed to actually recover the files. I've had instances where entire drives worth of valuable data are just gone. So a costly lesson. I think the main take away, which I got from my last critical hard drive crash experience is that these things have a life expectancy, like hands down hard drives do not live forever. And you really have to factor in the cost of redundancy in your business as a photographer to safely protect your hard work and investments. For example, since my last crash, i have never bought a single hard drive again... i've bought two each time. Setup an automatic backup protocol for when the drives are plugged in and no matter what happens to one, you always have the other. Thank you for sharing this valuable lesson.
You should get a portable SSD. Probably way more durable than what you’re using.
IDK. - For odd reasons I had 3 "C:" drive SSDs bitching so far. - One of them seems close to unusable the others "better", but not convincingly reliable. - Are all your memory cards still working? - If not: Why do you believe in SSDs? One of mine died for sure.
The only use case where you NEED(!) SSDs mechanically is operating them on vibrating bumping vehicles.
My microdrive died quickly but the usual desktop / laptop HDDs seem reasonably reliable.
There is unfortunately no perfect backup medium. Better rely on mass instead of class.
Why does a travelling photographer lug an external drive around at all? Memory cards became quite affordable, modern cameras have 2 slots, the crummiest Android device seems ready to take a 128GB Micro SD to serve as another backup.
I recall a time when photographers backed up to HDDs in fear of card failures & issues. What would make SSDs more reliable than cards?
Just found your channel and am currently binge watching! Great content, thanks so much for sharing 😄
The day my 1TB harddrive started making the ticking noise was heartbreaking... 😭 Now I use 3 different ones.
By the way, what kind of lighting do you use for these videos? (Been staring into your eyes to figure it out 😂)
First, thanks for your video, I really like the way you make them, you're super honest and natural. I really enjoy this. Once, I had a problem with 6 drives in a RAID5 array, it did cost me 3k, diagnostic was free (OnTrack, super pro). With one drive I think it should be 1.5k. Anyway, one important thing is that hard drives are mechanically fragile, therefore you should use SSDs for travel, and *forget completely* about HDD. The backup (with another drive or/and in the cloud) is another different point, important too. I had later my 2nd backups on a HDD that was sleeping (but plugged, inside the computer) most of the time, and it died being few years old, after I started to use it every day. One week later my third backup drive (6TB seagate enteprise capacity) died ! All that happened without any shock or travel. Everything safe, protected behind an UPS (FSP). Thanks to the 1st backup, I didn't loose anything, but that was scary. Fortunately, I learned that HGST HDD are the most reliable of all, and I'll use them in the future, in RAID6 array (I can have up to 2 drives broken without data loss), and have the main storage on SSDs, which don't die. However, this does not protect from ransomwares, therefore, I'm considering another backup, offline, with tapes, in a WORM (write once, read multiple times) configuration. And you put those tapes in another place, so in case of theft, fire, water disaster, you're still OK. If the data are important, then that's the best practices ! Cheers
Just shoot film. No digital file will outlast a hard copy film negative.
L
I felt so bad for you as you were explaining it i could feel the tears wanting to come out. Glad they recovered the files. That is a good thing :)
I bought my MacBook Pro when it was a year old. Within the first six months of having it, it failed, they covered it. Probably three weeks later, it failed again. They covered it. All in all, it probably failed 5 times FOR THE SAME THING. I always back everything up since that first fail. If it fails again, knock on wood, I hope Apple just gives me a new computer. You think they would have after it failing 5 times for the same thing and for them "fixing" it, but no. Lol, I understand though. I'm just hoping it never happens again.
It's so frustrating when something like this happens, and there is such a strong feeling of helplessness. Thank you for sharing your experience and thoughts with your community. People can hear geeks say "backup, backup, backup" all the time, but the message is much stronger when it comes from a more "typical" computer user.
I understand the reaction to this is "backup a bunch", though this has to be balanced with what each of us will be able to do on a regular basis. If we choose a process which is too complex, it will likely fail. For most non-professional photographers, I think 2-3 copies is a good balance. The most important thing is to be cautious and do *something*.
I totally got lost in your eyes and didn't hear a word you said!
She's right. We should always have backups. I'm taking programming classes at school. This year our school got hacked and we lost a lot of data. I was the only one in class who had a backup of my work and I am so glad about this because otherwise I would have lost most of my programming projects and I would have had to redo all of my current projects.
With Amazon Prime one has unlimited storage for photos
OLD Man Gamer I'm going to have to look in to that since I have Amazon prime.
The size limit for Amazon prime is 48.82 GB in size and they do store RAW files
The same thing happened to me! It completely discouraged me from taking on any new projects. I still feel like a failure because of it. But thank you Jesse for making this video because I didn’t think this happed to other photographers.
That's why I use Google Drive
quatie google drive has saved my life
what happened?
PC + external hdd/keep it on SD cards + cloud should be just fine. I would always suggest cloud or even two clouds instead of HDDs - it will be more expensive, but if somebody steal (or you somehow damage it) your backpack, you can loose 2 HDDs and PC at the same time. And all three backups are gone instantly.
What brand was it though?
If it's WD I'm done and I'm buying a different drive now. I've heard bad things
You AND mango street getting me today for not doing a good job at backing up my hard drives. It’s true though, it’s something in the back of my mind that I’ve always been scared of. Thanks to you guys I’ve just invested in backblaze for online storage and I’m spending the day tomorrow updating my back-ups across all 4 of my drives. Thanks for the reminder!
Jessica why you look so good Mama? Thanks for sharing you with us. I enjoy your videos.
awwwwww you are sooo sweet! thank you thank you!
I lost all my photography work two years ago, I was backing up some files on the hard drive and the lights just went off in my house. When I turned on again the computer, same history as yours... my drive wasn’t appearing in my home page, I found a way to fix the drive and recover my files, but 75% of them were damaged and have a different name. I know how you felt, great video.
Interesting....Mango Street posted earlier today that they experienced an experience similar to this two years ago and they used the same title...just a little less expensive loss. BACKUP in several different places and ways. :)
I made this video back in December and posted a preview of it on my instagram early January. It was scheduled for a specific date but I decided to release it early. Thanks for watching
i just said that lol
bot reply?
I just figured one of the companies mentioned was sponsoring these videos, but the Mango Street video and this one talk about using different strategies, hardware and cloud services. I’m going with coincidence, but it’s interesting to see two versions of the same topic close together AND the cross linking probably brought more views and subscribers to both!
This video was not sponsored in any way by any company. It is required by law to state if someone is sponsoring a video/product in a video and that is not the case here. Thank you
OH MY GOD! I have no idea what I would have done if this happened to me. I literally have my life in my hard drive! I don't think people would understand your frustration and helplessness unless their job was literally in a little box... I so feel for you and now I'm definitely backing all my files up. Thankyou!!! x
Don’t worry with your fine self lol. I lost my files while in Vegas and downloaded an app for Mac that allowed me to recover files that were deleted. I know that’s now the same as a mechanical issue but it still sucked! That’s an expensive issue so I hope you’re using SSD from now on! Keep up the great work.
Scott Miller what app did you purchase??? I’m dealing with the same issue and want to know if there are reliable apps out there that can help with this
I used Rescuepro but as I just looked back I realized my issue was on an SD card and not a hard drive. It might be worth a try, though. I paid like $40.
A professor once said that data doesn't exist unless it resides on three different medium. As a bit of a techie myself, (as well as hobbyist photographer) I'd like to help wherever possible.
If cloud storage isn't feasible (due to internet availability or long term cost because raws add up quickly) or you just want absolute control, having a home storage server is an idea for the raw archive rather than relying upon the workstation. File systems such as ZFS are purpose-made for allowing the tolerance of drive failures without jeopardizing data. Additionally, you also should consider some form of cold (offline) storage for your archive, preferably in a remote location. The cold storage will protect you from malware (particularly ransomware) and destruction of the home. Cloud storage can be used for a permanent archive as well if cost and internet are not issues, but it should not be connected to all the time due to aforementioned ransomeware risk (some vendors may provide protection for this though). Data storage is really a bit of a science in itself, as you need to fit the individual's or business' needs for the future without excessive expense now.
A portable drive should be used for current projects. For photography, a portable SSD would make sense due to the speed and sufficient storage (512GB can be had inexpensively) for most individual outings, as well as some factor of physical durability. Portable drives should not be used for primary long term storage. Further, carry no less than two.
Finally, all drives can fail suddenly, both SSD and HDD, regardless of how they're cared for. While avoiding drops reduces the chances of failure, I would strongly recommend not spending money on cases or anything else to protect the drives beyond organization purposes. The money spent here would be better put to a more robust storage solution.
Owesome makeup by the way . . . . . 😚😂😂
I lost a whole year of family photos (all my client work was backed up) when one of my hard drives failed. I still have it and want to try and recover what I can when I have the money. I’m so happy that I printed what I did so those memories aren’t completely lost.
While I was in school, I carried my hard drive EVERYWHERE with me and the backup right beside it. I unfortunately got lazy and stopped backing up my main drive during my second semester and my hard drive flakes out on me just as you had said. I tried everything and nothing worked. Fortunately I had almost everything backed up but a few months after that, my BACKUP was having problems and saying it was blank and I didn’t have a new backup at that point (because broke college student) I got so lucky and my hard drive just needed a few days and it worked but I sure as hell went out and got a different brand of hard drive for my new backup and have been backing up as much as I can. It is a NIGHTMARE to lose a hard drive you have not backed up. Lots of tears were shed in those situations. I couldn’t agree more with all the tips you gave, and I’d also add, keep your daily hard drive and backup in different locations in case there was a fire or something. That way they both don’t go down and you have the other one safe in another location. Thank you for this video Jessica. It’s a harsh reality to face but it is so important to be careful, especially when such a small and delicate thing hold so much of our lives! I hope nothing like this ever happens to you again!
I feel for you! This happened to me years ago in art school with all the photography work I needed to be graded the next day. The cost was 2500 to be fixed back then and that was in NYC. Luckily my professor saw a preview of my work the week before and loved it, but since then I learned you backup a backup for sure. Thanks for sharing.
Is that name the same of Mango Street's video on purpose?
Nope.
Loved both, so, fine by me. Love your videos, keep them coming!
Macarena Ibsen I really don’t think it’s a scripted ad, it’s the law to state if your video is sponsored, both the videos are different and, as she wrote in the pinned comment, she made the video last month.
Hi Jessica, I could recommend a portable SSD just for travel. It doesn't need to be a 1tb drive, but just enough to get you going abroad. SSD doesn't have moving parts so it won't fail mechanically.
I just saw the same video on Mango Street ... Weird...
Just give me a few seconds. I'm uploading a "My $2.000.000 mistake" video!
I made this video back in December and posted a preview of it on my instagram early January. It was scheduled for a while. Thank you!
But i liked mango street more.. they made it interesting and funny while giving tips, this video almost make me sad 😐 I prefer other videos by Jessica
Jazmin, Mango Street are friends of mine so if you enjoy their video that's a great thing :) I watch their videos all the time too!
If your hard drive makes a noise and won't mount, immediately stop trying to do anything with it. It's physically broken and you're probably making it worse. If you want to try to resurrect it, try shipping it to Seagate's hard drive data retrieval. It's expensive, but a whole lot less expensive than $4000 US. It's about $500 per drive, last I checked.
You are suppper photograph
I have about 9 drives at the moment and I have a drive that's specifically for travel and is a smaller size drive as well, as it's not being used to store large amounts and then many of the JPEGs of the images I want are stored on Smugmug.
In my career I've had one drive fail in a desktop of mine a few years ago. Fortunately I had majority of it backup. I did lose a few things, but nothing really important that I was crying about. My main thing was having my main images and having my Lightroom Catalog backed up.
that same video 1 hour before from MANGO STREET...... what new we love you and your content, so we expect new
Hi! I understand your concerns. I actually made this video (and used this exact title) back in December and posted a preview of it on my instagram Dec 9, 2017*. It was scheduled for a specific date but I decided to release it early today. Thanks for watching x
You expect her to know that a video that takes time to make, edit, and upload, is going to be on the same topic as someone else's who posted 1 hour ago? Come on. Also, not everyone follows mango street. So I can watch Jessica's video without a problem.
Obviously, you didn't watch both videos. Both super different. Smh.
am sorry if its hurt you. Really I love you and your photography. I am not with you on insta so sorry again
That's the thing, I don't have to watch both videos. I hope you support some of this youtubers personally via patreon if you are expecting them to never touch a subject someone else has already discussed.
I totally understand where you’re coming from same thing happened to me. And I learned the hard way, now I have a protective case and I have a back up for my back up .You live and you learn right.
Literally the same video as mango street put out today 😂
I made this back in December and posted a preview of it early January. Thank you!
Jessica Kobeissi sorry... Just an observation... I know you couldn't have watched theirs and made a whole video the same in like 3 hours... Didn't mean to annoy you 😔
You didn't annoy me at all! I can totally understand the mixup. Just wanted to address it directly :)
Jessica Kobeissi I totally understand that and I think everyone else who didn't will when they see your instagram story bout it. Glad I didn't offend you or whatever ☺️ this has happened to me so many times also... My macbook pro seems to break every 10 minutes and I never back up...😂 bit late for New year New me I guess 😂
Tom...thing is I don’t know who mango street is and don’t care. We are Jessicas peeps here. Not like she went and created the story ..geez what an inappropriate comment. She’s too classy to tell you off.
I think that the tech was on the right page, pull the HDD out of the casing and try a different cable / power supply.
the alternative is to get a spare HDD that is a SSD model. Try smaller drives so that you don't keep so much work on one drive.. but that's just my two cents.
Jessica, I’ve been binge watching your videos (discovered you yesterday). You have great tips and tricks!!! Looking forward to watching more videos :)
Fist I want to say I’m sorry... I can only imagine your frustration and the feeling of loss you must have felt seeing all your hard work completely disappear right before your eyes. 😧💔 PAINFUL Last year around July or September my Android Note 4 cell phone 📱 completely died on me. It worked in the morning and by the afternoon it completely shut down, wouldn’t turn on, and it just simply died. I lost my contacts and some other info I had on the phone but thankfully I did have my pics backed up.
Thanks for sharing this important reminder to us!! I am sure you will create more amazing content in the year/s ahead that will compensate a little for your lost work. I sure it will still be painful to think about but at least you have some of your beautiful pics on Instagram 👍🏻 send you a hug and i think your work is AMAZING. You’re such an inspiration! 💛
I would suggest having a NAS and set it up to copy stuff to the cloud, and do DVD or blu ray disks of the files.
The NAS will give you that direct and personal storage and having it back up a cloud service will help it back up any files you want backed up.
I had a similar experience where my hard drive stopped working after accidentally being dropped, luckily I had backed it up on another drive. A week later my backup hard drive stopped working too and there was no sign of recovery! It had EVERYTHING on it. All my memories, my work etc. Honestly so gutted.
Holy hell !! 4K !!?? I downloaded a recovery software for $100 bucks and recovered 75 percent of all my files I must have been so so lucky.. I guess if I had the money I would have spent the money to have professionals fix it. I’m glad you got your photos back !! You have been a big inspiration to me and influence your in my photography I’ve only been shooting 1 year and I’m not any where near as good but you are the reason I’m trying to make this career for once I found my passion and the one thing I want to do for the rest of my life !
Backing up my back ups has been in the back of my mind for a long time, but I always convinced myself it was overkill. Your experience has made me think again.
I feel for ya. Tech breaks, often from no fault of our own. But sometimes it is. I drowned my first brand new 5Dmk4 by not properly sealing the underwater housing it was in. Luckily at least the lens survived.
Recently I bought 6x6Tb drives, and 3 of them are duplicates of the other 3, i have seperate drives for time machine backups as well; it’s so important for people to know that hard drives have a life span and hard drives are relatively cheap! My iMac hard drive died the other day, and I was able to replace it with a new SSD, for under $200 AUD, the time machine backup restored the computer to the most recent backup and its now faster than before :D backblaze is a really good system - they backup your entire hard drive for $5 a month I think and if your hard drive dies they mail you out a new hard drive with the backups which you can either copy to a new hard drive and mail back or pay a small cost to keep the new drive :)
AHHH I feel you!!! This happened to me when I first started photography!
Whenever I go on trips I save the cards and don't format till I'm back home. I go with an empty hard drive and download when I get back to the room and as a 3rd backup I upload to my dropbox overnight while I sleep. So I literally will have 3 versions of the content I shot those days. So I have the cards, portable hard drive and dropbox of the shoot. I then use BackBlaze when I am home to backup all my stuff as an offsite storage area. But that's just my suggestions.
Jessica, I feel for you! I had an external hard drive go bad a few years ago and the files could not be recovered. We lost about 200 hours of graphic design work! It made us sick. But... it was a great lesson. Now we back up everything to a second hard drive, as well as to a cloud service.
after a couple of failures I got a QNAP NAS running RAID (2 mirrored drives) that sits at home and I can upload to remotely, so as long as there is a internet connection, I can back up. Also, I don't delete my SD cards until I get home, even after copying the files over to the laptop, so in case the laptop crashes/gets lost/damaged, I still have the files. If you need a on-the-go backup, in case you're someplace remote, pick up a SSD external drive, not a mechanical one.
Great vid - a cautionary tale! I use Dropbox Plus (2TB) to back up my files. Other options are to get a NAS drive/server; pricey but it gives you a ton of space, + you can swap out NAS drives (3.5" internal HDs), buy/add new ones, and also set it up so you have remote access like you're own private cloud service. Also there's Adobe cloud storage too.
After a shoot, I always try to keep my photos or video files on the SD cards for at least a week, back up to an external, plus give a copy to my client for back up. It pays to buy extra SD cards, and yep stick to smaller 1TB drives and get many of them for redundancy. SSD drives are more reliable but they're hella pricey too.
I'm sorry to hear of your issue. We've all had a bad hard drive and I constantly tell people to back up all their data on a regular basis and if they can back up the back up they should do so. Coincidentally, I just purchased a new 8TB Seagate external drive for super cheap this morning. I'm a photography hobbiest and an IT professional. I have 2 solid state and one mechanical drive in my laptop, and a couple of external usb drives. At some point I want to install a network storage device (NAS or Personal Cloud) so that I can access my files from anywhere. In January I had a client lose his hard drive, but I was fortunately able to recover files using software purchased for $129. Still that client has terabytes of files all labeled in sequential numbers that he has to go through. I have working files on a solid state drive separate from my operating system, copies on an external drive, and whole system backups on yet another drive. Plus photo images that I share with others are currently are on Drop Box.
Looks like you got a lot of people to back up. That’s seriously priceless, and helps so many people.
I have a "lacie" hard drive, because it is drop protected. Don't move any hard drive while it's powered on (there are moving parts inside)!
At home I have two 2tb drives in my pc and use "Backup Service Home 3" to automatically back up one hard drive to the other every hour. I don't use raid, because if you accidentally delete a photo on one hard drive it's lost on both.
It's advisable to make backups to a place other than your home (hard drive at a friends house, cloud, etc.) in case of a fire or flood.
On a couple of occasions, I have gotten a drive with a stuck read/write head to spin up by placing it in the freezer for a couple of hours (inside a ziplock bag to avoid moisture). Take it out of the cold, then plug it in (but leave it in the bag to prevent condensation), and it MIGHT work this time. As soon as it spins up, copy everything off of it, of course, because this is not a long-term fix.
From my filmmaking background:
General Structure at Whatever your "HomeBase" is:
• Original
• Backup of Original that you update as first priority
• Backup of Original (kept "offsite"... a friend's house, or at work, etc) which you update once a week or after a major shoot
• Cloud backup (if you have the monetary means)
*All physical backups are in RAID arrays
When on travel:
• Original
• Backup of Original kept in a different bag (or in a different car if with a crew of ppl, even better if the footage can be on two different flights)
• Tertiary backup on the cloud or an additional physical copy is best
Your friends are redundancy AND different physical locations of the media. Redundancy is nothing if your bag with all the footage is stolen/lost/home broken into or burned down (god forbid)
It gets expensive when you have terabytes from a shoot, but i suggest using a raid style workflow management (all storage media is in a RAID format (physical raid array), or you have a camera that can shoot data to two different cards on the fly (A7Riii))
Cheers!
Recently I’ve lost my hard drive 😭 I never took it out, the last time I remember using it was in my room, but I looked everywhere in the house but cannot find it 😩 and I have thousands of pictures. WORST FEELING, I hope i’ll find it.
I’ve also lost my camera bag which had my camera, 2 lenses and 5-6 memory card with lots of images 😢 this was 3 years ago when I was in France, I left it in a train.
Jess you’re not the only, it’s the worst feeling, I rather loose money than pictures ☹️😒
I feel your pain. I too lost a harddrive. One of the worst experiences of my life. Cost me $2000... Best money I ever spent and I can assure you, it'll never happen again. BACK UP, BACK UP, BACK UP!!!!!
Last year I decided to back up my backup and it actually was the best idea ever. I decided to use a NAS and it's the best for my files that I don't need every day anymore. Really recommend this system if you don't want to pay monthly for online storage.
You got good at backing up and online storage, it's a very useful and well-thought video, Jessica. A good replacement of the external HDD is the external SSD, it's a lot faster, smaller, quieter, more stable and rugged, because it has no moving parts, but the price per GB is a lot higher and it has a limited amount of write cycles, like after a few years you need to buy another one, but the catch is that in every second you can see how much life it has left and many times it lives a lot longer than the predicted number of write circles if you get a quality one. After losing many things when Windows 7 got broken out of nowhere and nothing was possible to recover I back up anything important, Dropbox and Google Drive are the most easy to use and share files from them, but Box gives you 50GB of free online storage, but it's a little cumbersome to use. All in all, if you are going to pay for online storage ,get the one you find the easier to use. :)
I remember watching a video just recently about a compact backup hard drive from fStoppers that is quite amazing.
Look up the Synology DS416slim. It’s a 4-bay drive that can backup in multiple drives and you can have 2 computers connected to it if you want.
I plan on getting one because I ultimately know that cutting corners on costs like backing up can one day cost more to fix.
I bought a Synology disk array for my backups. Also allows you to send your backups anywhere you have an internet connection. Good cautionary tale.