I've been doing all the challenges here and at another site and I've completed all the challenges here and had almost all the ones done at the other site. I've been saving them all to an external hard drive, a brand new 3 TB Western Digital. I check it for errors all the time, I optimize data, etc., to make sure that it stays in good shape. I had 21 layouts done for this month, not counting a few extra that weren't for challenges. Yesterday, we had a full power outage in town. Like, the whole town was out of power for about an hour. When I got home from work, my stuff on my laptop was fine because, of course, it has a battery. But everything from the past two or three weeks on my hard drive is now corrupted!! All of the layouts, the kits I've bought and/or downloaded, the challenge freebies, the pictures I've uploaded from the phones, everything!! I can't get them to open in Photoshop, Paint, Gimp, Windows Media, anything!! I'm so upset. I can reupload most of the photos and I should be able to get most of the kits and stuff, but my layouts! I can't possibly recreate all of those! Especially in time for the end of the month Since I'm back at work full-time!! How can I keep this from happening again? Would a battery backup that I plug the hard drive into work? Thanks! Dawn
I can't stress online back up enough. I use backblaze, and there are so many, some free for smaller amounts. $5 a month is peace of mind in my opinion. but................I had an EHD crash hard and I had EVERYthing on it...photos, pages and more...I felt like vomiting everytime I looked at it. So, I took it and put in a drawer, just heart sick. A year later, I was cleaning out drawers and on a whim I plugged it in. It clicked and whirred bad, but I got all the photos and important things off it, and it coughed this horrible sound and died forever.... as to the kits...you can look at your order history, some may still be active download links and the others. Contact the designers and explain. They too are scrappers and understand. You may be surprised. as to redoing them. Give it a whirl....get a tall coffee, some chocolate and good book on cd/online. Enjoy and create! hugs to you too
@scrapfor5 I just got that exact same EHD. This is a cautionary tale. Also- our previous two EHDs looked destroyed my daughter basically poured a glass of water on one of them, and the other one I dropped down the stairs. We took the, and the new EHD to "Computer Canada" where they lifted the old stuff off the two old drives and onto the new one for $100.
Most of the data on the hard drive is fine, it's just the last two or three weeks stuff that's bad. Question, I save all my layouts in a "Digi layouts in progress" folder in layers, either .psd or .tff form so that I can go back and make changes if I need to. Then I save the actual flattened layout full-size in another folder. Can I save them like that in an online back up service or would that use up so much data that it would cost me a fortune?
it will not cost you a fortune. I have my entire hard drive and two EHDs for $5 a month. It comes automatically out of my checking account, and I seriously smile each time I see in on my bank statement! lol I save as tiff, a high resolution jpg and my flattened save for web. I do delete my TIFF once they are uploaded to Shutterfly (where I get my books printed) and book printed and in my hot little hands. But the jpg, I keep forevah! My husband uses Carbonite...he has less to back up here at home, and so he gets a free service. With them all, you have to figure out what extra or what you don't want to back up...and it takes a bit for the initial back up to complete.
First off, that is such a bummer! Hopefully you can get it figured out and recover everything. And my tip is to remember that an EHD is only a "backup" of your files if you also have things kept somewhere else; a backup implies you keep it somewhere else as well. So my suggestion is to have 2 (or more!) EHDs, or have your EHD *and* an online backup. The idea is to have at least 2 copies of everything and to keep one copy in another location (obviously a cloud-based service would be "another location" lol; personally, I keep an EHD at my parents' home. They live in another state). But I'd recommend not using only cloud-based services because I've heard horror stories about them as well. I've started to keep photos on Amazon Prime Photo but I still keep pics on my 3 EHDs. One is getting pretty full so I'll probably transfer it to my parents and buy one or two more. The problem with my system is that I have to manually transfer everything, which takes time (versus a scheduled online backup). But it's worked for me so far!
Ok, I have Amazon Prime, I had no idea they had a Photo "thing". lol. I actually have four other external hard drives. Two of them the electronic parts that connect to the computer messed up but the drives themselves are good. The other two are actually at the computer shop right now. I'm hoping they can pull off some of the photos that I know for a fact that I am missing. I guess I can start burning my stuff on a dvd at the end of the day when I work on something or save it to a flash drive. At least then, I'd have "something". ugh. This sucks royally.
YEA for having more than one EHD! So as horrible as this is, it's hopefully not going to be too bad since you already have a computer shop you trust to bring this wonky one if need be. And I didn't know about Prime Photos either until Amazon's homepage had a header that said "Hi, you're using all of your Prime benefits EXCEPT..." and I was like "What the heck is Prime Photos?!" I don't put LOs in my Photos but I guess you could since they're saved as .jpg files. Perhaps a cloud system is good for you if EHDs don't like you much?
lol. Yeah, hard drives definitely don't like me very much! I'm only using the one that messed up because the two that the connectors messed up on haven't been repaired. Yes, my computer shop in town is owned by a guy I went to school with so he's great to work with. He's really good at what he does and he doesn't charge an arm and a leg to work on stuff. I'm going to buy a battery backup today and a really large flash drive plus I'm probably going to get an online back up and I'll probably upload a bunch to Amazon Prime!!
I have a battery backup, just because I have a desktop now and every time there was a minor blip, my computer would shut down. It's just not good for the computer, not to mention loss of work or possible damage. The battery backup powers my computer, my EHD, the modem and router. It's been one of the best things I've ever done, and I highly recommend it. Before I ever had battery backup, I did have an EHD failure. I fortunately had Backblaze and was able to recover everything by ordering a new EHD with all my files on it. It was nerve wracking waiting for the EHD to ship, but I did have the option to download small bits here and there as I needed them while I was waiting. It's a service that I definitely suggest having. I never think about it, other than occasionally checking to make sure the backups are up-to-date. I'm so sorry this has happened to you, and I'm sending out all positive thoughts that your friend will be able to recover all of your EHD contents. ((HUGS))
@gonewiththewind I don't want to hijack the thread from @scrapfor5 but what exactly is a battery backup? She mentioned one in her OP. Y'all are making me think I need one too. We bought a whole-home surge protector when we first bought the house to save our electronics but I never thought about a backup battery until reading this thread and people talking about them.
Oh I know the feels, and I am an advocate for online backup too (Backblaze for the win!). My computer was going crazy in February, so I put everything onto my hard drive and formatted my computer. That same afternoon before I had put all of my stuff back onto my computer, my 1 year old pick up my hard drive, looked at me and threw it on the floor. Needless to say it wasn't working anymore. We couldn't afford the cost to get it looked at ($50 just for a check and at least $500 to actually fix it) but my hubby was confident her knew what the problem was and he did manage to open it up and we got everything back (all but 1 file). I went straight over to the Backblaze website and signed up. I had been meaning to for ages, and the horrible gut wrenching feeling of possibly losing all of my precious photos and pages was not a feeling I wanted again. Having said that. I realised this morning that my computer keeps turning off at night even though it shouldn't, so Backblaze hasn't been able to do it's thing. Going to have to fix that. I hope you can get back those new pages!!
@Tree City A battery backup is essentially a battery that keeps your computer (and whatever else you have plugged into it) running even when there is a power failure. It looks like a small computer tower and is plugged in, only activating when there is a power outage. Like a battery for a laptop works . . . the power goes out, but the laptop, even if plugged in, keeps going (unless you've taken the battery out). Since I have a desktop now, if the power goes out, my computer is turned off mid-function, which is never good for the health of the computer, not to mention losing whatever I'm working on. So the battery backup gives me time to shut down the computer (and really, I have about an hour of use, depending on what programs I'm using, so I can finish something I'm working on), and it also allows the modem and router to continue working as well as my EHD and one of my monitors. After completing research, this is the one that I purchased: https://amzn.com/B00NWRO7O8 It has 10 outlets, 5 of them battery and surge protected and 5 of them surge protected. It also has two USB ports. Hope that helps!
A battery backup is like a giant surge protector that charges like a battery. The one that I just bought will hold a charge for about 45 minutes after the power goes out. What it does, is that it holds your devices' power on so that it gives you time to save and properly shut down your devices instead of them abruptly losing power and corrupting data like mine did. I was at work and I wouldn't have been here to shut down my laptop and turn off my EHD the other day but I could have called my son and had him do it because he was home at the time. The one I just bought is a LOT smaller than the old one that we used to have, which is a good thing. lol.
I've lost absolutely everything several times. I have a handful of pictures of my kids as babies. It's horrible every time. Backblaze all the way. Every time my PC takes an extra 5 seconds to startup my heart stops. But it is SUCH a relief to know that it's backed up somewhere. I no longer use an EHD because, well, I don't trust them. Every single EHD I've ever had has just up and died at just about exactly the 18 month mark. I have two internal drives (work // play) and an image of my PC on disk that I update every 6 months. But I'd probably be ok with just Backblaze.
I am definitely signing up with Backblaze as soon as I get this mess sorted out. I'm pretty sure I have all the corrupted kits re-downloaded. I have all the good layouts backed up to a flash drive and the bad ones moved to a folder named "layouts to redo" which will take me a lifetime. ugh. Anyway, I've already warned my kids not to delete photos off their phones so that I can re-upload those too. Most of the stuff that was corrupted was just from the last two weeks but it was the layouts that are killing me. Recreating them is going to be the death of me. Even the tiny size images that I had for web viewing are corrupted.
Ugh! I'm so sorry! I lost some layouts earlier this year because the backup service I was using wasn't actually backing up, even though it said it was. Grrrr. I still haven't gone back and redone them yet. I aim for the 3-2-1 backup plan. 3 copies, 2 different mediums, 1 offsite. I have 2 EHD's - one I use as a 'backup' and a portable one that I use daily to move kits to, and save layouts on, etc. I move my new stuff onto the Desktop EHD about once a week. And all of that is backed up via Backblaze (not the service that failed me). I also save my finished layouts to Flickr as full size jpegs. Flickr gives me 1 TB free space, and I can download the original printable size. I don't bother with CD/DVD anymore, especially since one CD scratched and I lost a whole quarter worth of photos.
All but the last layout that I had just finished which had taken me most of the day. I just downloaded them and resized to fit on my card so that at least I have that for the end of the month. I have all the layouts that I finished here uploaded so I'll download those so that I have the copy to look at and recreate the ones that are corrupted. I'll get them done eventually, mainly because I'm stubborn. lol.
