This is Why You Backup!

[Calibretto]

This is the story of what my roommate went through these past couple of months. Thought I'd share it with my fellow PC compatriots.

My roommate is a "professional" photographer. I put quotes around that because of what I talk about next.

I know there are a lot of photographers on here. What's one of the most important things a photographer must do? That's right...backup.

My roommate bought a 500GB Seagate FreeAgent Go portable drive to store his photos in so that he could easily take them with him wherever. That's the only place he kept all of his precious photos. Bad idea, right? Right.

Eventually the drive crashed and he lost all his precious photos. He had to completely reformat in order to get the drive working properly again. I didn't sympathize for him at all because he didn't have his photos backed up, which for a photographer, there's no excuse for that.

I thought he learned his lesson when he bought a backup 1TB Western Digital external (he hates Seagate now), but apparently he didn't learn his lesson.

Fast forward to today when the same Seagate drive crashed again. This time he had all of the recordings that his band recorded. Again, he only had those recordings stored on the Seagate drive and nowhere else. He said that was because he only had room on his Seagate drive. Again, a photographer should not have to deal with a lack of storage space.

Now I know Seagate drives have a reputation for the higher failure rate, and this story somewhat proves that, but then again, that's a reason why you should always have a backup of everything, no matter what kind of hard drive you have.

Quote from my roommate: "I'm going to drive to Seagate HQ and beat all of their asses."

Thoughts?

 

[ganzey]

make sure he brings a baseball bat

 

[The_Other_One]

Been there, done that... That's why I tend to keep my files in multiple locations... I even have a USB drive I connect to my NAS every week or so and run backups so I can have duplicates of the files. Speaking of which, I do need to make some fresh backups of my files.

 

[Laquer Head]

Quote from my roommate: "I'm going to drive to Seagate HQ and beat all of their asses."

Thoughts?

Double Own3D!

nobody to blame but the user!

 

[diduknowthat]

Deservedly so.

 

[tremmor]

im one for backing up often also. good about i think. at least every 3mo max. On the other hand some people would be good candidates for a raid setup.

 

[mickeycooley.ie]

X2. if any of his photos were important he would have a solid back-up in place or RAID. Effectively he dumped his bankroll, twice. not very "professional"

hope he learned before a third time occurs.

 

[Ramodkk]

I've lost my pictures once.. Not happening again. You're right, no sympathy here.

 

[2048Megabytes]

If you don't learn from your bad experience the first time there really is no excuse. Enjoy your pain.

 

[Calibretto]

This keeps getting even more hilarious.

He wanted me to transfer some of my HD movies to his external WD drive, but it was formatted in FAT32, which obviously can't transfer a file over 4GB. He got all pissed and was like, "I freakin' hate PCs. I'm pretty sure I can transfer larger files on FAT32 on my Mac."

Isn't the transfer limit on FAT32 universal throughout PC and Mac? My roommate is such an Apple fanboy it's ridiculous.

 

[ScOuT]

Ya, that guy needs a class on storing media! That sucks for him but come on, really? You have to touch fire to see what "hot" means I guess.

I keep all photos and home videos on 3 different drives. My drive that has operating system in, a second drive that I use for storage and a Western Digital external.

Kinda makes getting pictures off of a camera a pain putting them in 3 places but I will never loose them!

 

[2048Megabytes]

Pulled this infomation off Wikipedia:

The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 byte (232−1 bytes).

It has nothing to do with your system not being a Macintosh.

 

[Calibretto]

Pulled this infomation off Wikipedia:

The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 byte (232−1 bytes).

It has nothing to do with your system not being a Macintosh.

^^That's what I thought. See, my roommate was blaming it on the PC and said that his Mac could do it. So lame.

 

[PohTayToez]

You know, if the hard drive has just crashed but is still functioning (i.e. it's saying that you need to reformat the drive to use it) it's still pretty easy to recover the data off of it.

 

[tlarkin]

True story:

A few years ago my job wasn't paying me enough money. So I decided to become a sub contractor on the side and worked nights and weekends to make extra cash. Well, let me tell you, there are not a lot of people that know both Mac and Windows inside and out like I do. So I got a lot of Mac business and a lot of business from switchers and a lot of business where the IT staff only knew one or the other and couldn't get both to work together.

Word of mouth spread rather fast and I was doing lots of side work. Even fixed a few Chiefs and Royals players systems and networks on the side. The one niche thing that I fell into was that I did side work for a few recording studios and an Independent record label. So, a lot of musicians got a hold of my name and number through other ones that had used me in the past.

So I get a phone call, its like 11AM and I am at my day job. It is this guy who is super frantic and wants my help, and he lives in Lawrence (about 30 miles West of where I live) and he runs a recording studio. This guy had two band's full albums on one hard drive with no back ups and it crashed. He asked me if I could recover it and I said, I could attempt to, but I can't guarantee anything. Then it came down to my fees. I told him for me to drive to Lawrence and even try it, it will be a minimum $150, then an additional $75 for every hour I work after the first hour. Pretty standard rates for me at the time. The guy thought I was nuts. So i told him to grab the yellow pages and look up data recovery centers around town and get quotes. he called me about 2 hours later and said I was dirt cheap. I went out there, recovered 90% of his data, had to struggle to get him to pay me what he really owed me, and then I had to turn the whole ordeal into a parable about how this would have never happened if he had good practices keeping data backed up. He was suppose to hire me again to set that all up for him but he never called me back, probably figured he could just buy an external and be done with it. I never heard from him since.

 

[driverdj2000]

i have a seagate freeagent too.hate it.
windows keeps saying usb device malfunction and movies keep stopping when playing off it to my ps3,so to be on the safeside i bought a lacie.the lacie is perfect.
1st seagate and last seagate

 

[Aastii]

Is it mean to laugh at him, because I am. You have to be pretty dumb to have it happen twice!!

My mum managed to lose all of my little sisters baby photos (well my step dad lost them off her computer) and for a while she had 2 hard drives in her system, both with important stuff on. Now though, she seems to have forgotten it and has 1 drive with all important stuff on, by which I mean draft letters, pictures, videos, work stuff and the number of times I have told her it will happen again is stupid and she still won't buy another HDD.

some people are just asking for it I guess

 

[Michael]

^^That's what I thought. See, my roommate was blaming it on the PC and said that his Mac could do it. So lame.

So he's uninformed, so what? Not everybody's a nerd

i have a seagate freeagent too.hate it.
windows keeps saying usb device malfunction and movies keep stopping when playing off it to my ps3,so to be on the safeside i bought a lacie.the lacie is perfect.
1st seagate and last seagate

I have two Seagate FreeAgent external drives, both 250GB. One is FAT32, the other is NFTS. Both are used daily, the FAT32 drive is used exclusively for watching HD content on my PS3 and 360. Neither has let me down in the year that I've owned them.
I also run two Seagate Barracuda 320GB, 16MB Cache, single platter 3.5" HDD's in my desktop. When I used to use my desktop, it was on 24/7. The drives have been in there for a little over a year and a half now and they still function like new. If I had room for a desktop, I'd still be using it, too bad I had to give it up for a home theater room

Obviously, you must either have a dud, or you abuse your equipment, neither of those things make Seagate a bad company, and it doesn't mean that they make bad drives.

I'm running a Samsung Spinpoint 500GB in my new laptop and a WD 'Blue' 320GB in my old laptop, so I'm in no way a Seagate 'fanboy'. I firmly believe they make great drives.

-Michael

 

[2048Megabytes]

I also agree Michael. I have owned a couple of Seagate hard drives for a few years and they haven't let me down. Seagate makes good quality hard drives in my opinion.

 

[Calibretto]

So he's uninformed, so what? Not everybody's a nerd

It's not just that. He's saying that his Mac can transfer files larger than 4GB on FAT32, which it can't. So he's not only uninformed, but he makes false claims.