Finding a safe place for my digital fotos

Published 20 February 08 02:06 PM | Hans VB 

I always thought that hard disk crashes were happening to people who were rough on their hardware. I never experienced a hard disk crash since I started to work with PC's. Until half a year ago, that is. Since then I had 2 HD's crash on me.

The first one was the most serious. Because I'm terrible at backing up my systems, I lost all my pictures between July 06 and October 06. I don't care so much about email and other data.

That still didn't teach me a lesson. I just had my external Western Digital 500GB MyBook crash. Fortunately after a night of letting it sleep in the fridge I could recover the file using FileScavenger.

So now I'm going to deal with this seriously! I don't want to loose my families' digital memories.

I'm tackling this issue like this:

1. Rebuilding my home desktop machine (Dell Dimension 8300) with Vista

2. Figuring out a strategy to keep all my families' pictures in one folder (possibly with subfolders)

3. Uploading everything to my Flickr Pro account using 'some' tool

4. Installing a Windows Home Server for back ups

 

I'm hoping that redundany at home and over the web will create a truely safe home for our digital memories.

I'm about ready to blog about the first step...

Comments

# MSDN Blog Postings » 2008 » February » 20 said on February 20, 2008 8:43 AM:

PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2008/02/20/

# Kevin Arnold said on February 20, 2008 9:15 AM:

I have a question... Are there any scientific effects on letting a (crashed)HDD in the fridge for some time? or Is it your joke? :)

# Hans VB said on February 20, 2008 9:37 AM:

Now, it's true. The IT department at Microsoft Belgium tried it with my first HD that crashed but that didn't help.

With my last disk to crash, you could hear it making a thumbing nice as it tried to spin. That was gone after I put it in the fridge. I could recover the files using filescavenger but if I want to reuse the disk I will need to reformat it because Windows says it isn't formatted anymore.

There are numerous reports on using this technique on the internet. I believe it could work because some components shrink as they get colder...

I had a hard time believing it too...

# Hans VB's WebLog said on February 20, 2008 9:57 AM:

As I explained in my email earlier today, I'm upgrading my home infrastructure to create a safer place

# Noticias externas said on February 20, 2008 10:32 AM:

As I explained in my email earlier today, I'm upgrading my home infrastructure to create a safer

# joshpoley said on February 20, 2008 1:32 PM:

Check out http://www.drobo.com/

They provide a nice little stand-alone raid box.

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