Backup Failures!

Spider web in bush covered by the morning dew (click to enlarge)
This is am 11mp crop from a 36mp Nikon D800E image handheld.
Nikon D810, Nikon 24-120mm f/4 VR lens @ 120mm; ISO 800; 1/125th sec. @ f/11

Hard drives do and will fail.  How many times have I read that statement?  Well, not me. I bought my first home computer in the mid-1980s and I've never had an issue with a hard drive.  Hard drive failure is for someone else, not me....  Yea, right!

I've always been a pretty conservative guy, in the sense that I don't take many big risks or exceed moderation in most aspects of my life.  I can't help it, is just the way I was raised. When it comes to my images, which I really value, I also try not to take risks by not having sufficient backup to avoid losing them.  I have a pretty robust backup strategy that I believe works pretty well for me and is not too expensive.  That being said, I have had two hard drive failures in the past 6 months!  As the saying goes, "What's with that?"

I keep all my images in one master folder on a secondary internal hard drive in my desktop computer.  When I import images into Lightroom, they go onto this drive and another, external drive, simultaneously.  Only then, when I have two copies of each image on separate hard drives (with visual verification as well), do I place my memory cards back in my camera and reformat them.

For backup, I have another external hard drive that backs up everything on my computer each night.  Additionally, I keep another drive off premises which I bring home to back up everything once to twice per month.  So, I have quite a bit of redundancy as well as off-site safety in case of fire, lightning strike, flooding or theft.  In a worse case scenario, I would lose a couple of weeks of images and data if everything on-site was destroyed.

As my data increases, I replace smaller hard drives with larger ones and copy the existing data to these larger drives.  I now have two 5TB hard drives, a 4TB hard drive and a 3TB hard drive plus my primary drive that contains my operating system and programs.

I have been buying Seagate internal and external hard drives for many years.  I have never had an issue with them in the past.  However, in the past 6 months, two of the Seagate 3TB external hard drives have failed.  What I experienced is this: Everything is and was fine while working on images or data, then the next morning I see a failure in the backup protocol log file.  In both cases, I have not been able to even access the hard drive at all! I've tried all the normal repair things to no avail.  Even if I was able to repair and access the drives, I would no longer use them as, at that point, I have lost confidence in their ability to operate properly.

Coincidentally, a month or two ago, I was reading an article about the experiences of one of the cloud storage companies. I can't remember which one right now.  Evidently, the company has hundreds and hundreds of hard drives.  Annually, if my recollection serves me well, they do an analysis of hard drive failures.  In the article I read, they indicated that most of their various branded and size hard drives have a failure rate of less than 5%. However, their Seagate 3TB hard drives had a failure rate of somewhere around 20-25%. The failure rate of larger and smaller Seagate drives was similar to their other drives, but the 3TB drives had an unusually high failure rate.  The Seagate 3TB drives are the ones that failed me.

I'm glad I have greater redundancy that necessary as the failures didn't impact me other than having to replace them and copy the files to the new drives.  This time, I did not buy Seagate drives as I may have learned my lesson.

I've never had a hard drive failure in the 30 years I've owned computers.  Hard drives will and do fail.  Be prepared.  Have redundancy.  Don't lose your images or documents of value.  You already know this.  But, have you done something about it?

Just passing along my experience as it may help you down the road.

Thanks for looking.  Enjoy!

Dennis Mook

Many of my images can be found at www.dennismook.com.  Please pay it a visit.  I add new images regularly.  Thank you.

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