How I lost all my photographs - and got them back
A few weeks back, I had the most catastrophic event I could imagine in photography: I formatted my images drive. Let me repeat that - I “blew away” my drive with 99% of my images and video files.
My images were gone. Kaput. Lost forever.
No, I still don’t know how I did it. I intended reformatting a LaCie portable USB drive and instead, reformatted a 6TB LaCie desktop drive.
My first thought was Apple’s Time Machine. No worries, I could restore from trusty TM! Oh no I couldn’t. As I pieced together some days later, reformatting a drive changes the MacOS “mount point” and thereafter, Time Machine didn’t recognise the drive as something I had backed up. Yes, it’s possible to change the mount point, but it requires a level of knowledge (and confidence) I lack.
After waiting for my life to pass before me eyes, I went to plan B: Backblaze.
I have had a dual backup strategy for some time (which I’ve never had to use), with Time Machine as the local solution and cloud storage covering disasters like a house fire or a break in or (as I discovered), reformatting a drive. Earlier this year, I switched from another provider to Backblaze - and I’m glad I did.
Backblaze provides an application which sits on your computer and backs up files (less system files and the like) to their servers. Backup is continuous and unlimited - though it takes a while for the initial backup - days or weeks depending on the volume you’re backing up and the speed of your internet. Once that initial backup is complete, it keeps on top of my needs, backing up quite large volumes of image files in a few hours.
If you need to, you can recover individual files or folders on-line, with the BB web site bundling up your files into a Zip file and downloading to your computer. In theory, I could have recovered my entire drive this way - and maybe I should have, but more on that later.
I initially recovered some files from a shoot a couple of days earlier, which I had to have, and in fact, I continued to grab bundles of files over the next couple of weeks. However, my primary method was to use to use BB’s “Restore by mail” option whereby you pay USD189 and they place up to 8TB on a USB drive and FedEx it to you. The actual creation of the drive took about three days and FedEx took another week to get the drive from California to Western Australia, but on arrival, I had (almost) all the files I had inadvertently erased. (A few public domain music files apparently hadn’t been backed up, but as I can download them, it’s not an issue.)
So, I synced my files on my drive with those on the USB drive, told Capture One where to find them (another little side effect of the aforementioned mount point “feature” I suspect) and got on with life - a little older but wiser.
Oh - and Backblaze claimed “You can even send the drive back to Backblaze within 30 days for a refund.” So I did - assuming they would not unreasonably charge for processing and shipping, but no - they refunded the lot. So apart from the self-inflicted anguish, the total cost of this near-catastrophe was AUD30 to send the drive back to Backblaze.
So … the bottom line is that even without drive failures, fires, floods or theft, you can lose your files. In this, your best protection is cloud storage. I would add, with no vested interest whatsoever, that if you are looking for on-line storage, Backblaze is worth checking out. They got me out of my self-inflicted calamity.
Happy - and safe, shooting.
Shane Baker
