Data Dilemma

We recently had a minor disaster at Rebecca Long Photography. I came home one day to Rebecca telling me that "Fat Bear" (Rebecca gives all of our hard drives names involving a bear) was ejecting itself from the computer. Trying not to panic I examined the situation and came to similar results. All our photos from summer weddings thus far were on the hard drive. Now, we had multiple back-ups of these photos, so completely losing clients photos was never in the picture. However this is the hard drive we were working off of, so all the time put in to sorting and editing on those weddings was potentially lost. I'd estimate about 60 hours of work.

We spent most of that night exploring different options for our situation. I read some forums about similar problems and we tried the drive on different computers ruling out various potential issues. Nothing worked so we figured the drive had "crashed." We then explored various recovery options. They all had one thing in common: expensive. I had no idea about the world of data recovery. It must be much harder than I imagined and not many people doing it.

The next day Rebecca went to a guy here in Birmingham who had a nice website. He ended up running the business out of his home and looked like he had not left his home in a long time. Jorts, unshaven, ratty t-shirt, and open fly were just a few of the first things noticed. He then proceeded to tell Rebecca the doom and gloom of data loss. "Your hard drives will probably only last 6 months and all the things you've been doing have been wrong. At this point I wonder why the manufacturers don't tell you the proper way to use their products. He told Rebecca even he can't do the recovery himself and has to send it off for a mere $1200. We decided to keep looking around. She found a company in Florida that actually does the recovery. She talked to Richard and after her sob story he gave her a quote of $800 if they are able to recover your stuff. We decided it was worth it and sent it off.

In the mean time we decided to revamp our back-up protocol. We purchased a Drobo S. I'm not the best at explaining this, but I think its like a mini server. It has 5 slots for 3.5" hard drives. It uses the RAID technology and automatically makes back-ups of your stuff. So if one of the drives fails, everything is still on the other ones. So we also got four 1.5 terabyte drives to put in it. I also bought a battery back-up for her computer and new storage device in case of a power failure. So $2000 later, we feel more protected and now follow the "3-2-1 back-up method"

• Make 3 backups of everything
• On 2 different types of media
• Take 1 to a different location

With there being lots more digital information and all of it needing to be stored, the ability to do this indefinitely seems like quite a challenge. Hard drives keep getting bigger and files themselves keep getting larger. The fear of losing things can be quite haunting.

All of this was a good reminder on where you store your treasure.

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal." - Matthew 6:19-20