Don't wait! DO it NOW!

Today's post is going to be a little more serious. 

About 2 weeks ago one of my Western Digital passports (external hard drive) stopped. I would plug it in, it would spin up...and the nothing. My computer was not reading it. I finally gave it to my husband to take a look at. He use to work for Dell and knew a thing or two about recovering hard drives. 

He went downstairs to fix it. When he came back up I could tell by the look on his face that the news was not good.  After doing everything he could (even with some input from our neighbor) he told me the bad news.

I CRIED! And then cried a little more. It was a 1TB hard drive that was 100mb away from being full.

It had the last year of all my clients on there, and the last year of my own personal pictures. Pictures of my two cute boys. Family happenings, holidays, even pictures of my nieces and nephews. 

I thought to myself, "how did this happen? The hard drive is not THAT old!"

and then I thought,

"Kelli, you know better. You should have backed it up sooner."

The sad thing is I had just bought a 2 TB hard drive to back it all up on. It came in the mail around the same time it stopped working. 

I am here to plead to all of you photographers AND non photographers to back up your hard drives. ALWAYS make sure you have 2 copies of a picture.  I am going to give you some options below.

Option #1

Have several external hard drives. When you upload to one hard drive, upload to the other one right after that. That way if one fails you have another copy. And if that happens (one failing) quickly get another and copy it.

Option #2

Use the cloud! It may have a fee with it every month, but it will not fail! You can also access your files from anywhere! Here are a couple of the companies...

justcloud zipcloud mypcbackup sugarsync mozy backupgenie box

Option#3

Get something like THIS that will automatically back it up and is fast and more safe than a regular external hard drive!

Option #4

Get your own server. This is what I will be doing. It makes sense for me. My husband and I have talked it over and hopefully soon I will have my own server!!

Pretty much what I am saying is that you have many options to choose from. Whatever one you choose will be great, just get it done. Otherwise you will be crying over lost pictures like I still am. :) I went 7 years without any problems-which is amazing. I did back up my files but it was never a fast thing. Please, pretty please don't wait and do it now!! Because it will happen to you!!

Oh, one little side note. Stay away from the USB 3 drives. Out of all the hard drives I have, I only have two USB3 ones but those are the ones that have given me problems. Never again!!

Now, to actually see some pictures head on over to my friends blog. 

Tara is awesome and rocks at what she does!