Failure!

I try to be very good at making sure I have multiple copies of my data. I used to do DVD back ups of all my photographs and my i-Tunes library along with have a a copy on an external hard drive. Last June I started using Backblaze instead of DVD's. I always stored my DVD backups off site. But due to the large amount of photograph's I was taking it became cumbersome. I have over 250 gigabytes of data on DVD. Backblaze provided the solution. It offered real time, unlimited storage, offsite backups for $5 a month per computer. So I decided to see how it worked. After several weeks of it uploading my data for my initial backup, it kept up to my workflow and pace quite nicely. I was and am very pleased.

So Christmas day 2009 my wonderful elderly sheltland sheepdog helped me out. Since winter had taken hold she found a nice warm place to sleep, beside the desktop computer. Well on Christmas day she pulled the 500 gigabyte external hard drive off the top of the desktop's tower onto the floor. This corrupted the entire hard drive. The hard drive was half full with about 250 gigabytes of photos etc. on it.

So the day after Christmas I was rushing to Wal-mart to get a new hard drive and start restoring my data. I bought a new Western Digital 1 terabyte external hard drive and began recovering my data. I only had about 6 months of data to recover from Backblaze. I did find that several of my DVD backups were corrupted. After cataloging what I was able to recover from DVD's I began downloading my data from Backblaze. It was a slow process but I was thankful I had my photos back.

So now I have 3 backups of my data. I have 2 external hard drives now with matching data and an off-site backup thanks to Backblaze.

So I took apart the old hard drive and shot this photo of it.



This was shot with a black foam core under the hard drive. A 32" diffuser in the back with a Lumopro LP120 at 1/4 power with a red and purple gel behind the diffuser. The hard drive is lit with a Sony HVL-F58AM with a home made grid that is flagged from above and camera left. The shot was with a Minolta 50mm prime at f4.5 at 1/125, using CTR-301P radio triggers.