Hard drive failure is a pain and although I back up drives regularly, sometimes I get lazy. Case in point, the hard drive above (Seagate momentus XT) was backed up 3 months ago. I normally try to run backups on my laptop drives at least once a month, but I was on the road the last few months and kind of forgot about it. Thankfully I save all of my footage and photos to a portable raid 1 drive when i’m on the road. The bad thing is that I saved the last 8 or so project files I was working on to the drive above and now the work on those projects is reset to zero.

I still have all of my footage, but the time lines that were lost represent about 40 hours worth of work. Which means I’ll have to spend most of next week re editing. Basically the moral of the store is, if you don’t already, BACK YOUR DATA UP!

One thing that makes it easier for me to back up my laptop drive is to use an SATA drive docking station, they run about $25 and you can easily drop in either a 2.5 or 3.5 hard drive. I’ve had good luck using Norton Ghost but there are a number of free options on the market. Drop a spare drive in, press a button, and go to bed. In the morning you have a full back up of your drive that’s ready to be dropped in to your laptop should the event arise. After this little fiasco, I’ll probably stay on top of things for 6 or 8 months, but it’s easy to forget about it and slack off.


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