Time to ditch my external drive?

[mom2rtk]

I've been working on organizing my computer and backing things up again.

I have all of my photos on a pair of external drives. I have those backed up on another set of drives.

In the course of moving and organizing, I have found some issues with one of my 1 TB external drives. When I plug it in as a second drive (which I need to do when copying from one drive to the other) the computer won't recognize it. When I plug it in by itself, the computer recognizes.

Is it time to just ditch the drive? I have all the photos backed up elsewhere, but am not sure what I want to do with this one.

Could anything other than drive failure be causing this?

 

[xlxo]

I would ditch the drive or start copying data off of it. I had a similar situation where the drive went funny. After a few hours, the drive corruption just got worse.

 

[barbaraann]

When I take pictures from my memory cards, and add them to my computer, I always do two things. I add them to an external drive, and I make a CD. That way, I have two backups. I feel more confident about having them on the CD's than I do with the external drive.

 

[SkaGoat]

Do you have to plug either drive into the wall to make it work? or are they both bus powered?

 

[SkaGoat]

When I take pictures from my memory cards, and add them to my computer, I always do two things. I add them to an external drive, and I make a CD. That way, I have two backups. I feel more confident about having them on the CD's than I do with the external drive.

I would say CD / DVDs are almost the same as having no backup at all. They break down over time, and sometimes that time is only a few years.

 

[Spork3127]

Agree about CD's/DVD's. It's too easy to damage one of the disks. Storage is cheap and plentiful these days for what you get. If you have Amazon prime, they offer picture backup to the cloud as part of the Prime membership.

 

[mom2rtk]

I would ditch the drive or start copying data off of it. I had a similar situation where the drive went funny. After a few hours, the drive corruption just got worse.

I have a hunch that's where it's headed. It's empty right now as I had just formatted it and planned to back something else up on it. I might find a way to back up a backup on it once I free up some space on my C drive again. Or I might just throw it away so I don't forget later that it's iffy.

 

[mom2rtk]

When I take pictures from my memory cards, and add them to my computer, I always do two things. I add them to an external drive, and I make a CD. That way, I have two backups. I feel more confident about having them on the CD's than I do with the external drive.

I gave up on CDs and DVDs long ago. Just too much content for those formats. And too labor intensive.

 

[mom2rtk]

Do you have to plug either drive into the wall to make it work? or are they both bus powered?

They are USB powered.

 

[mom2rtk]

Agree about CD's/DVD's. It's too easy to damage one of the disks. Storage is cheap and plentiful these days for what you get. If you have Amazon prime, they offer picture backup to the cloud as part of the Prime membership.

I probably need to look into that. I have been trying to upload a bunch of my old photos in batches to Flickr (in folders visible only to me). But that really requires that I sort through the junk and the good stuff. And I really don't have time for that. I'd really rather just keep backup drives. And backups of my backups.

 

[SkaGoat]

They are USB powered.

My guess is when you plug the 2nd drive in, there isn't enough power to run both of them at the same time, especially if they both work when individually plugged in. USB has a limited amount of power that it can provide to connected devices.

 

[xlxo]

I feel more confident about having them on the CD's than I do with the external drive.

Personally, I had more problems with CD's. Optical fails more often for me.

 

[elmoandzoey]

My guess is when you plug the 2nd drive in, there isn't enough power to run both of them at the same time, especially if they both work when individually plugged in. USB has a limited amount of power that it can provide to connected devices.

That would be my hunch as well. I have two externals that are absolutely fine on their own but I am not able to hook them up to the laptop at the same time because they are USB powered. The one who gets plugged in second never gets recognized because it just doesn't get enough USB power to start. I would suggest to run a deep check on the drive and see if it is really corrupt. For me it sounds to be more an issue of not getting enough power to start when you hook up two drives.

 

[elmoandzoey]

Personally, I had more problems with CD's. Optical fails more often for me.

Same here. I have stopped using DVDs/CDs as backup a long time ago. I am mostly using solid state drives now since they are more resilient than regular external drives.

 

[dakotix]

I work in IT and deal with this all the time. Replace the hard drive.

 

[mom2rtk]

My guess is when you plug the 2nd drive in, there isn't enough power to run both of them at the same time, especially if they both work when individually plugged in. USB has a limited amount of power that it can provide to connected devices.

I hadn't even considered that. I agree that seems likely, except that it's always worked when the other one was plugged in before.

I work in IT and deal with this all the time. Replace the hard drive.

I think that's still what I'll end up doing.

 

[cmwade77]

I have finally decided to move all of my photos online. I am using Amazon's Cloud drive to store the original files (it is fairly cheap for "unlimited" storage) and google photos, which I tell it to store in high quality, which gives me unlimited space for free.

Why the move you may ask, well the answer is simple, I have near 4 TB of photos that have been scattered everywhere throughout the years and this way, everything is organized and I can find it easily. I also don't have to keep buying additional hard drives (which when I can go through 256GB in a single weekend would get very expensive), so this seemed like the most cost effective and reliable solution at this point in time.

It also prevents issues like the OP has where a drive may be failing.

 

[xlxo]

A warning for online photo sites...

 

[sharona]

I probably need to look into that. I have been trying to upload a bunch of my old photos in batches to Flickr (in folders visible only to me). But that really requires that I sort through the junk and the good stuff. And I really don't have time for that. I'd really rather just keep backup drives. And backups of my backups.

Just be careful relying on Flickr for long term storage. I have read a few posts on some photography forums recently about Yahoo! looking to sell or shut down Flickr because it is not making money. No idea if/when this will happen...

Cloud storage is the way to go. I have had 2 different external drives fail on me for different reasons. I was able to use a hard drive reader to get my photos off of one of them and, fortunately, I had a back up of the back up on the other. At one point I thought I had lost all of my DD's first communion pics but, I had shared them with a relative via Shutterfly and was pleasantly surprised to find them still available on that site.

 

[mom2rtk]

Just be careful relying on Flickr for long term storage. I have read a few posts on some photography forums recently about Yahoo! looking to sell or shut down Flickr because it is not making money. No idea if/when this will happen...

Cloud storage is the way to go. I have had 2 different external drives fail on me for different reasons. I was able to use a hard drive reader to get my photos off of one of them and, fortunately, I had a back up of the back up on the other. At one point I thought I had lost all of my DD's first communion pics but, I had shared them with a relative via Shutterfly and was pleasantly surprised to find them still available on that site.

That's too bad about Flickr. I hope nothing happens to it. Thanks for the heads up though.

I appreciate everyone's thoughts on this. I ordered 2 more hard drives. I think at this point I'm looking to have 2 complete sets of backups (so 3 sets). I just need some quality time now with the computer to organize and start copying again. I'm going to putz around with the problem drive too and see if I can figure out if it was a shortage of USB power. If I think that was the issue, I might continue to use it as a second backup.

I'm appreciating the discussion of cloud storage. For those of you using such a service, can you share what it costs? And I guess more importantly, can I store RAW files there?

Sharona, I'm so glad you didn't lose the First Communion photos. That would be awful.

I do print a fair number of photos for my scrapbooks, but would sure hate to have those as my only versions.