Oh the sweet joys of photographing things you love, oh the bitter sorrow of having those images deleted by a stupid piece of software. SO, if you're on Twitter and notice anything that I ever say you will no doubt have been copping the hot as hell fire, aimed at LaCie tweets coming out of my fingers this afternoon. I've been sprouting on about backup for the last few weeks, trying to find a good solution to roll with and let you know about... Well, I did and, as it happens, it turned out to be the most simple solution - two external drives, files on one, copies on another.. un-plug, put away. Then I went one step further and added a piece of software into the equation - my rules were that it had to be free, had to be PC and Mac and had to work...
I've disliked LaCie external disks for a good while now - too hot, no fan, dead disks :: repeat - as a result, all of the disks that I buy for work and indeed the editors buy are G-Technology... Fans, Solid, pricey... But I found that LaCie make some software called SilverKeeper (I won't link to it) that is a one click backup for mac... They also mac a one click backup for PC - so that's the cross platform covered (mention Linux, I dare you) I downloaded and made two folders on my mac / external drive and tested the software backwards and forwards - worked fine.
This is where the trouble starts - as a combined effort I might add... I have two external G-Raid drives... A 500GB G-Raid Mini and a 4TB G-Raid V4. On both of those disks I have a folder named 2009 (Don't ask, it just happened) and, as when you copy one file to another on a Mac it just copies over the top - no merge. SO, I got this software that said it "Synchronized" files, tried it out... Great!
I got the courage up to run it on my Live and my Backup this morning - One Synching to the other - one way, no turning back... Yeah, no turning back alright!! It deleted the last month worth as the last month worth wasn't on my source drive... Don't ask because I don't bloody know how it happened - all I know is that there are multiple folders missing where there shouldn't be. I've lost magazine images that I was meant to deliver tonight, Boxing images - all my RAW images are gone (I have them still on CF, but yes, gone from my drives) I have a review that was meant to be in tonight, images - you guessed it - gone.
So, Right now I am manually, one folder at a time, copying everything to my primary drive, then I'm going to manually copy everything to the second backup drive. Then I'm going to point Lightroom at it and Re-Sync my Lightroom library.
Why did this all start? Lightroom - Like I said, A combined effort... With Lightroom, if you have two or more drives down the left hand in your library, and you have a 2009 folder in one and a 2009 folder in another drive, you can't grab multiple folders from "2009 - a" and drag them into "2009 - b" if you could, I would have delivered the images tonight and not look like a prat... Lightroom? Fail.
I am half way through copying 2008 - 271.24GB to Drive A, I am going to make a cake and I will be back later to watch you all laughing at me.
Lightroom, Fail... LaCie, Fail...
I nearly cried at work...