Sunday, August 02, 2015

R.I.P. Maxtor One Touch III


My original external hard drive died. I had to take my desktop PC to the shop to have a virus removed and when I reconnected everything, the drive wasn't being recognized. Tried to hook it up to my laptop - no luck. I had stopped backing up to this drive years ago, but I occasionally went looking for an old photo and found it there. 

Took it to the repair guy and he couldn't get it to work either. "It's the controller", he said. "Maxtor went out of business after being sued for lost data." Wonderful. He said he could 'try' to open it up and rebuild something-something... a 35% chance of getting any data back. Since this was not critical data that would stop me in my tracks, I opted not to spend the money. If a particular photo was good enough, I had probably uploaded it to Pbase, I reasoned. Most of what was on the drive was also backed up on CDs. It's a pain in the arse to go through stacks of discs, but if I had to, I could.

Enter this photo, from December 2001:


One of my favorites. I managed to find the backup disc and copied it to my desktop. Now I need to get it onto my new 2TB external drive.  sigh

While I was at it, I brought this one over as well. Also from December 2001:


And now I want to book a vacay at the beach...



3 comments:

Tom Dills said...

I'm always a bit surprised when photographers keep their photos in different places. I guess because our software does such a good job keeping track of them we don't feel like we need to. Maybe I was fortunate that early on I started keeping everything on one drive so that was never an issue. If you haven't already, get everything you have onto one drive, buy a couple of backup drives and make copies. And back them up periodically!

monstev said...

I have 2 external drives, one is a backup of the other.I would be devastated if I lost the data and not because of its monetary value. Each image is a bit of history and a part of me.

Faye White said...

Any mechanical device can fail. I have purchased a new ext. drive big enough for everything, for a while. I hadn't gotten around to transferring the data from the Maxtor before it failed. Murphy's Law.