SnapperTalk

What are the risks of data-loss for photographers? Events like fire and theft shouldn’t be discounted, and can be countered by having backups in a different location. Apart from those, however, the risks are mainly twofold:

1. Hard drive failure: i.e. the drive mechanically or electronically dies. Retrieving data is virtually impossible without the help of hugely expensive specialists who would take the actual disk-platters out of the dead drive and rebuild them into a new identical drive.

Examples:

1. The drive “just dies” - this is much more common than you might think.
2. The drive is fried by a power-surge.
3. The drive sustain a knock or drop.
4. Because of inadequate cooling, the drive overheats

2. Corruption/Human error: Either the drive format becomes corrupted, individual files become corrupted, or one accidentally deletes or writes over files that one wanted to keep.

Examples:

1. You delete files yourself by accident.
2. You overwrite files yourself by accident (even worse).
3. You hit “save” not “save as” in Photoshop and overwrite an original jpeg with an edited version.
4. A file becomes corrupted.
5. The volume format, directories etc become corrupted.
6. You decide to backup your files but get confused and copy your backup disk containing 10,000 images onto your original disk containing 11,000 images - instead of vice versa - and thus delete those newest 1000 images.

In the case of both situations, you are going to want to go back to copies of the original files on another hard-disk or DVDs, and retrieve those files.

Next page: 2. RAID - What is it?
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