All Gone

[Mad Koala Bear]

The external hard-drive on which I store my erotica died last week, a week or two before I wa finally oing to get round to backing it all up. Now none of the 50k+ catalogued stills or 10k+ video clips/films are inaccessible; hundreds of hours over the years searching for stuff of shall we say a recherché style that floats my boat, wasted, much of it material I'll never find again, quite a bit of stuff I shot and edited myself, all gone. It was going to be my stash ready for when some British government in the near future finally bans porn. I certainly wont be popping down to PCWorld to see if they can save it all for me.

And you know what? I dont really care. Its a shame to lose it all, but what the heck, it was only porn. Its not like it was irreplaceable family history. I feel somehow released from the pressure to find ever more pics of a certain model or video of some sexual act. I dont think I was addicted to porn, but I was probably spending a little bit too much time on it.

What to do with all the new time on my hands?

[mizlaplan]

Oh the horror
I think you're in denial about just how awful this situation is.
I understand what you're saying, I used to have a purge every now and then, but the vintage erotica fiend in me always resurfaced eventually.
With storage so cheap at the moment I save literally everything.
The best advice I can give you is to brew up several pints of industrial strength tea and attempt to rebuild your collection as soon as possible.
To anyone else out there, invest in a cheap and cheerful external hard disk drive and every month or so back your files up.

[pharoahegypt]

i have a back up of my back up..... but then i'm perhaps lucky in that regard.

but even that doesn't protect you from your own stupidity, as i found out the other week when i deleted some files from one of them, wrongly thinking the second back up had them too, only to find out later that i had neglected to copy them over after all..... d'oh!

as i've said before though guys; please don't fall for the current C*****/PCW**** offer that is being promoted, as all those USB 3.0 HDD's they are selling all contain Western Digital Hard-drives; no matter what name they use to disguise this fact which last 2 yrs, MAXIMUM..!!! Spend a little more and invest in another brand; Samsung perhaps; it will save you so much heartache and loss when that initial 2 yrs runs out......

NB... I'm not slating WD hd's par se, just their portable versions, which are cheaply made and break down or go faulty way too easily..... I have a WD hd as a master hd in my Dell PC, and its fine for this stationary use.

[Sir Honkers]

Sing C'est La Vie
And soon you will see
Your cares will be free
Just sing C'est La Vie

[snowy25]

Originally Posted by pharoahegypt

NB... I'm not slating WD hd's par se, just their portable versions, which are cheaply made and break down or go faulty way too easily..... I have a WD hd as a master hd in my Dell PC, and its fine for this stationary use.

I have 4 WD portable hard drives that are used daily and are a good few years old and have never had any issues. Mine however are smaller, 500GB drives, so it could be that smaller drives are more reliable than large ones. Its possible they have cut corners on the larger drives to make them as cheap as possible to cope with the ever increasing need of customers.

In my experience the reliability of a hard drive is something that no one can actually measure as it varies so much. For everyone that's had one brand last them years there are dozens who have seen numerous die. People will say X brand is best but then dozens of people will relate horror stories about how they had nothing but trouble with that brand. The only reliable hard drive storage is to backup your data to numerous drives. The problem with that is it gets expensive to have 3-4 drives with exactly the same data on them.

[9876543210]

snowy25,

Originally Posted by snowy25

The problem with that is it gets expensive to have 3-4 drives with exactly the same data on them.

Two really should be enough. That quantity has always worked well for me.

[billybunter]

I'd be more gutted if I lost my music files. Porn I can take or leave.

[snowy25]

Originally Posted by 9876543210

snowy25,



Two really should be enough. That quantity has always worked well for me.

I think some people like to be extra secure as its possible, although pretty unlikely that both would go at the same time. I need more because all my drives are 500-750GB ones. I prefer this size because if one goes down I only lose a small amount of stuff compared to a 2/3TB drive. However I also have 2 netbooks, a laptop and a mini-mac that have stuff stored on them whilst I transfer stuff around.

[palo5]

Originally Posted by billybunter

I'd be more gutted if I lost my music files.

F*** the music. It's all on YouTube

[DTravel]

I went thru a similar tragedy a little over a year ago. The external HD I kept my image collection on died. I sent my HD to a data recovery firm but they were only able to save around 1/3 of the files. A million plus image files - gone. Like Damp-Patch, its stuff I had collected over many years and much of it I don't expect I will ever be able to replace.