22 Nov Storing pictures on removable drives is a recipe for disaster

It is a scene repeated on countless TV news programs. Devastated families returning to their homes to find them in ruins after a fire.

In most cases, when they are interviewed, their greatest grief is directed towards the loss of their most precious possessions: their collection of family pictures. The memories you simply cannot replace.

There is a simple message from this: protect your pictures!

It doesn’t take a bushfire to cause this havoc, a defective hard disc can be just as destructive.

Over the past few months a number of clients have come to me with hard drives that have either failed or been damaged. The prevalence of this problem led me to become an agent for two well-respected hard drive recovery centres which can often succeed in recovering at least some of the lost data.

Personally, I’d rather not be sending disks off to be recovered as it is expensive (around $800-$1,200 for each disk) and there is still no guarantee that everything can be recovered. I was lucky in one case where the contents were all safely retrieved but in another they managed to extract only 10 per cent of the drive data before the hard drive failed for good.

This is a critical factor when storing digital pictures. You simply cannot replace them if they are lost.

While portable hard drives are great for short-term storage, they simply should not be relied upon for long-term storage of photos or documents. Most back-up tools on your computer don’t back up external drives by default so you can’t rely on things like Time machine to make a copy, without having to set up each new drive. It’s cumbersome and easy to forget.

The solution? Have your pictures stored properly at home with redundant copies located offsite. With the NBN coming online it is easier to upload large photo libraries securely online as a back-up. And what do you put at home? Use a NAS (Network Attached Storage) to load your images and have them safely stored on multiple drives. If a single drive fails, you still lose nothing.

We can help set up a NAS where you can copy and store your photos and have them backed up offsite (either via another NAS or a Cloud destination). You can also view your images anywhere using the app, meaning you don’t need to leave them on your mobile device.

View our common NAS builds in our online shop or contact us via our online form and we can help tailor a solution to your needs. If you have a drive that has stopped working, get in touch with us and we can help assess your drive