So photography has been a hobby of mine for over 10 years. Over that time i had amassed at least 700 gigabytes of JPEGs, CR2raw files, MPEG files and MOV files not to mention the associated Lightroom catalog and backups of the catalog. Depending on who you are that may seem like a lot or it could seem like a drop in the bucket. The real issue is that it was that it was irreplaceable.

When I started of back in late 2005 my hard drive was rated at 250 gigabytes and by the time you took into consideration the OS and the other program files it left with a little over 190 gigabytes to store stuff. So I eventually invested in an external hard drive to store the entire portfolio separately. Fast forward to 2015 and I am still storing all my work on an external hard drive all be it a 3 terabyte Seagate.

Now I could go into a long sad diatribe about why I didn’t invest in some sort of redundancy solution but I will keep it simple.

It all boils down to denial and procrastination.

No one believes that it is going to happen to them and as long as there are no signs of it happening why bother.

So were back in 2015 I start my pc one morning and I hear a noise coming from the back of my tower. The noise itself doesn’t sound unusual it just sounds like the drive is revving up but not getting to start. I open explorer to see if I see the icon and sure enough it’s not there. I tried to remain calm and do everything that I could think of; unplug and plug back, reboot machine, check the control panel, check the device manager. Nothing.

So basically the worst came to pass and the drive was dead. What happens next is a probably going to need its own blog post but in the end I was set back US $550 and about 30-50% of my data is gone forever.