Backing Up Data – Is your data really protected?

The Discovery

I recently went on a photography trip to Oregon. I accumulated over four thousand images including several time-lapse sequences shot over a week. When I returned, I copied the raw files from my two cameras to an external drive. I began editing a few images and also a time-lapse sequence. After working on my Oregon images until past midnight, I set up a time-lapse sequence to process overnight. At 6:30 am the following morning, I checked on the progress and discovered that my entire Oregon folder was gone. Poof, as if it never existed. I thought I was losing my mind. Did I accidentally move it to another drive? Nope. Accidentally delete it? Nope. GONE. All 4k + images plus all the edits I finished thus far. Frost Me.

I checked the recycle bin and scanned all the drives. No Oregon folder.

ICM Roses. Master edit lost. 📷 – Nikon Z9 | 🔘 – Nikon 28-400 mm | 🎞 – ISO 100 |🔘 – f/5.6 | 🕒 – 1/60 second⁠ | ND 4

The Backup

I am OCD about backing up my data. However, I discovered that even my extreme tendencies to protect my data had a hole. I approached the process of backing up under the premise that hardware would be the cause of data loss. I never considered the operating system to be the source of failure. A bad assumption for sure.

I have tens of thousands of images on external drives. I don’t use the drives physically mounted in my computers to store my data. This is mainly due to the fact I have two computers, a laptop and a desktop computer and both need access to the data in these drives. External drives make the data independent from the machine and also protect it from any potential issue that a computer may encounter.

The data is backed up to the cloud via a service, BackBlaze. What I like about BackBlaze is that it is cost-effective for folks like me who have many terabytes of data that require backup. They do not limit the amount of data. The only caveat is that it is limited to one computer and does not support the backup of NAS drives. As of this writing, I have 20 terabytes of data backed up. BackBlaze has saved me many times from failed or corrupt drives. I can’t say enough about the value of a good backup service.

Bandon Beach MW. Master edit lost. |📷 – Nikon Z9 | 🔘 – Nikon 20 mm | 🎞 – ISO 3200 |🔘 – f/1.8 | 🕒 – 5 second⁠s

The Panic & The Horror

So, what caused this cluster? A feature in Windows that affects Win 10 and 11 deletes stuff outside its designated areas. I didn’t turn this on, nor did I know it existed. The Microsoft forums had many posts about files and folders randomly deleted out of the blue.

This particular link mirrored my predicament. Although it references Windows 10, it applies to Windows 11 as well.

[Solved] Stop Windows 10 from Deleting Files without Asking – EaseUS

Storage Sense appears to be the culprit. I ran the EaseUS recovery program. It ran for 6 days. I was horrified to discover that thousands of files were also arbitrarily deleted, including PSD files of the solar eclipse and a folder of a Milky Way time-lapse I shot two weeks before. Oddly, it never found a single file from Oregon.

I don’t use Windows Defender, only Avast. However, Storage Sense is active regardless of whether a third-party antivirus product is used or not.

I am certain there are other files that EaseUS recovery didn’t find and are now gone. The dread is deep.

Although I backup to the cloud via Backblaze, it didn’t get to my Oregon folder before it disappeared, so there was nothing to recover from the cloud. I subsequently recovered the raw files from my CFexpress and XQD cards.

Yaquina Head Light. Master edit lost. |📷 – Nikon Z9 | 🔘 – Nikon 28-400 mm | 🎞 – ISO 64 |🔘 – f/8 | 🕒 – 1/8 second⁠

Plugging the Hole

I use high-capacity memory cards on all my cameras. This accomplishes a few things. I don’t swap out cards on travels, preventing a potential lost card in the shuffle. I also never delete images while I shoot. This can potentially corrupt the card. Cleanup of misfires occurs after I download, never on my camera. The large capacity also acts as an interim backup. I currently use 325 GB and 256 GB Delkin Black CFexpress cards with my Z9 and await a sale to have more on hand. My other cameras use SD and XQD cards, these are all 512 GB and 256 GB cards respectively.

Since the debacle, I’ve added new external drives and run Acronis True Image to back up the data in addition to the cloud backup I have in place. My desktop machine is on Windows 11 Pro. I leave the original raw files on the memory cards and rename the camera-named folders to a more descriptive name. These remain on the memory cards for a longer duration of time.

I am now assessing a new cloud backup service called CrashPlan. Like BackBlaze, it doesn’t limit the amount of data. For a similar cost to BackBlaze, I can back up two machines, instead of just one.

As a Nikon shooter, I can access 20 GB of cloud storage on Nikon Image Space. Canon offers a similar program. I’d suggest checking into your camera maker’s offerings as well.

📷 – Nikon Z9 | 🔘 – Nikon 28-400 mm | 🎞 – ISO 64 |🔘 – f/22 | 🕒 – 5 second⁠s

Hard Drive Health

Assessing your hard drive health is important before sectors start to fail and data is lost. I am specifically addressing Windows PCs, but there are Mac utilities that serve similar functions.

Every time my computers boot up, Crystal Disk Info runs and checks the health of each of the drives. Once a drive begins to fail, the utility shows there are issues well before the drive starts to demonstrate problems, which is often too late to recover all the data.

Run CHKDSK on each of your drives.

This is a system utility that has been around for decades. It is powerful and corrects issues on your drives. Run Command Prompt as an Admin.

CHKDSK can be run without the switch. It will check the drive but won’t fix anything but it can give you insight into whether there are issues to correct.

CHKDSK / f will fix errors it finds.

Learn more about CHKDSK. Once you run CHKDSK with the /f switch, do not interrupt it. It can take a while depending upon the size of the drive and what it is fixing.

Sharing Ways to Prevent Data Loss

I am thankful to know many photographers who share their knowledge. We have a wonderful community and I hope you share your methodology to save your data and ultimately those instants of time we can never relive.

From Will Korn:

Here is my travel workflow, which I believe is bulletproof unless my card fails in the field (to protect against that could set my camera to save duplicates to its second card slot. I might do that if I were a professional photographer, but I am not).

My laptop is for travel, and my desktop is my archive. It so happens that the laptop is a Macbook, the desktop is a Windows PC;  it doesn’t matter. 

For every trip I take, I  create a new catalog (I eventually delete these). Each night during the trip I upload the images to from the memory card to lightroom on my laptop, and do whatever processing I want. When I go to bed I backup that catalog and its images to an external drive. I do this with a simple folder copy command.

On arrival home, I use lightroom’s “import from another catalog,” command and then everything is back in one place with my master catalog. 

Also, I just purchased 1TB card for my camera, there is now no longer a need to clear the card before everything is saved and backed up at home.

My desktop PC is backed up to its own external hard drive and a cloud service, but that process is another story. 

From Bruce Herwig:

My backup solution:
Off the chip to a SolidState 4TB harddrive.
TimeMachine to a local hard drive (spinning kind)
GoodSync to Google Drive (cloud)
Google Photos (for all my edited .jpgs (different cloud)

Have you experienced data loss? Do you currently have a backup plan? What has worked well for you? Let’s hear them in the comments.

© Silvana Della Camera

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