HELP! LR5 Photographs .... all missing ... external drive crashed.

[SchmidyK]

Have you ever thought you were doing it all correctly just to discover you were completely wrong?  I have three external harddrives ...  and I set them up so I'd have complete redundancy except, that's not what I did.   And now my 4TB Seagate is being shipped to the Seagate lab to recover (fingers crossed) 4TB of images from the past 10 years.  

What I thought I was doing was having a complete copy from one drive to another -- but what I was *actually* doing was having all my .RAW images on one, duplicates of them on the same drive and then the catalog backup on a separate drive. 

Here's what I want to know -- so that I set it up correctly next time.  How do I have a complete copy from one drive to another?  Without manually dragging and dropping each time?   Are there programs that help with this?  

Thank you!

Katie

[JP Hess]

There are a myriad of hard drive backup programs, cloud backup services, etc. Just do a web search to find one that suits your needs. I use Google Drive to back up my images. It's a little slow and time-consuming, but it gets the job done. And it's a free and unlimited space benefit from where I retired a few years ago. So I back up small batches occasionally and overnight.

[SchmidyK]

this whole mess makes me want to retire ... it's my 10th year in business and I cannot believe I did this!  I read the Scott Kelby book ... set up my catalog as suggested ...  still did it wrong!!  

[dj_paige]

I'm not understanding something here. If you have external HD with complete copies of your original images, why do you need to send a drive to Seagate? Why don't you just use a disk with complete copies?

[SchmidyK]

All of my images are on the drive ... but my mac won't recognize the drive.  I can't access anything on it.  I was unable to remount it in any of the ports on the back of my computer or my second mac.   I was on the phone with seagate for almost two hours -- we ran a troubleshooting program and it still couldn't access the files.   My original files and the backup files were on the same dumb drive.   My catalog backups are on a different drive ... but not the files so my catalog isn't working.  Does that make sense? 

[dj_paige]

Yes, it makes sense now. Thanks

[dj_paige]

I use Carbonite as cloud backup. Not free, but I think a good value.

I also use WinZip Pro to backup my catalog file and photos locally on a regular basis.

[ManiacJoe]

Sounds like you had the right idea, just a few mistakes in the setup. The catch to it all is making sure that the path names to the source and destination folders are completely correct.

My backups are fairly low tech in that I use a shell script to do all the file copies from the source drives to the backup drives. 

After I transfer the images from the memory cards to my hard drive, I will do a simple copy-paste to get the files quickly onto the backup drives. The backup scripts may not get run until the next day.