That moment you realize you've just lost 10 years of work...
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Just another plea for backups folks... My current computer was built in 2016 (just changed the GPU in 2020 or 2021), I used to do backups for years, but stopped doing a long while ago, as I stopped making 3D anyway. A few months ago, I finally went back into Daz, spent a LOT of time making my own bodyshape on G8 (using both products and stuff made myself), that I use to make all chars, made about 20 characters that were stunning, new poses for them, custom textures, etc, but never took the time to backup anything, except a few poses and custom fix morphs. 2 days ago, the hard-drive that has all daz content (libraries, installers, pictures, well, everything) died, so now I have to find and reinstall everything from scratch, and try to remake all these characters and stuff, meh ><... Had planned to clone that hard-drive on a new one, bought 3-4 weeks ago, but of course the new HD is still in it's package... Lesson learned the had-way xD
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In late November of 2025, my back-up drive failed. I had it looked at by a local tech, who recommended I send it to a lab. The lab told me the drive was so badly damaged, there was dust from the discs inside. Both the local tech and the lab recommended changing consumer grade back-up HDDs every 5 years. Mine was almost 8 years old. It had material I had transferred from my previous back-up drive so I ended up losing almost 15 years of work, and irreplaceable photos.
So yes, back up is a good practice, but don't forget the back up drives have a limited life as well.
Well, like you say, 10 years is perhaps not too bad after all, but in my case, this is the 1st time ever I have a dead hard-drive Oo. I mean, all drives from older/previous computers, I stopped using of course, but they still work whenever I put them into an external case. I still have some dating from Windows xp era that are still booting lol. I used to take Western Digital all the time, but for some reasons I don't remember, this one was a Seagate... Will never buy Seagate stuff anymore. In fact I'm wondering if I shouldn't take an ssd to put the Daz libraries on, and keep the hard-drive that wasn't used yet (a Seagate again ><) for the rest, installers, pictures, etc.
Just to note: If it is the only copy, it is not a backup, it is an archive. A second copy would be a backup, ideally somewhere else. Not everyone can afford the extra storage, but if you have invested years of blood, sweat and tears in your work, is it not worth a couple hundred dollars to guarantee its safety?
(if it's it is, then it is it's, else it's its)
I have a rotation of 3 USB sticks and a separate physical HDD in the computer. Sunday night is big backup night.
Sure, if you really want to be safe you have a backup of the backup, and another one in a safe at your uncle's holidays home etc ;) , but one is already a good start. Anyway I finally bought a new WD to use instead of the Seagate I had planned to use, don't trust these disks anymore (not sure if this really makes a difference, but the Seagate are very thin, with a single plate composed of layers, sort of, whereas the WD do have several plates with a single layer, it seems ?). The Seagate will be used for storing zip and installers. The chase for installers will take days alone Oo, omg.
I've been buying computer equipment for personal use for over 40 years. There was never a year when "Don't buy Seagate" wasn't the rule of thumb. How they have stayed in business is amazing.
I've been cutting a lot of operating costs, but one thing I'm constant on is Dropbox. Turn that on every evening to basically do cloud backups of my stuff.
Saves on considerable concerns, and doesn't require much effort on my part.
For anyone with one (or too many) internal or external (USB) big drives and find the 'sync' services are not enough for your backup needs. Backblaze offer unlimited backup for flat rate per computer.
They have a bad reputation ? I wasn't aware of this, I guess everyone do the same, stick with the brands that worked for you, power supply I always go with Seasonic, fans with Noctua etc, but disks, sometimes you don't find the proper one from your favorite brand at the moment you need it. Or I probably "wanted" to try Seagate with that damn disk xD, I don't remember, tbh. Have had some Toshiba and Samsung too (just 1 of each brand), no problem but they were not used a lot, that said. All the WD I've had, they still work, even grandpas ones.
Automated backups in the cloud yes, feels safe for sure, but not everyone want to rely on online solutions, I think (personally I prefer to make backups myself, offline).
I use Backblaze too, with the extended option that keeps old fles for a year after they are gone from the system (they do have an ndefinite option, but that is chnaged by the amount of data rathr than a flat rate). Both a local back up and a remote service are good ideas (which reminds me that I haven't set up a local back up yet for this system).
I have found Western Diigital more unreliable than Seagate. Well, I think, I'm not sure of that. I have backups of backups so I don't particularly need to worry about brand name. I never access the backups anyway, but I have them.
What I found out that I don't like is if you don't "refresh" SSDs once a year, they can go bad. Huh? Something about loosing their charge. I forget exactly what it is you do though? I know it's not copy to another disk & copy back, it's something simple...maybe you just plug it into the USB bus a few hours, so if it's that, I guess 1 hour a month once a month, will keep you from forgetting to recharge your SSDs.
There must be some sort of hidden factor. I have never had a Seagate drive fail, but every WD drive I have ever bought did, and I don't buy WD anymore. But other people swear the opposite.
It wasn't this thread where I said Seagate has been on "never buy" lists for over forty years that I'm aware of? Back then, even major magazines would print articles saying Seagate was unreliable.
Weird to see this in two different threads.
ouch, reminds me of working on an environment (urban sprawl 3) for 3 months, and then a lightning storm wiped out everything and I had to start again from scratch
Yeah, SSD drives need to receive power regularly to maintain data (I’ve heard 3 months as the longest to safely go without power before begining to risk data loss), so they are not great as backup/archive storage. Think of them only as working drives.
Critical data, I backup to HDDs (you can get “pocket” sized ones that draw their power from USB) and rotate occasionally to offsite (e.g., bank safe deposit box, secure office in a separate building, trusted relatives’ house, etc.). Don’t forget to make those backups encrypted, unless there is nothing confidential.
Cloud backup is an additional layer, but not sufficient as your only backup.
Really, having just one type of backup is risky.
One small business I managed IT for, we had multiple HDD backups rotating daily (maintaining at least 2 backup drives onsite, and at least 1 offsite), plus occasional copies to a third site, plus some critical stuff backed up online.
No one ever regretted having too many backups—maybe other than criminals who foolishly documented their misdeeds on computer.
I had a drive AND a backup fail within a week of each other a couple years ago so know the pain
4TB of stuff I will never get back
have a drawer full of failed drives of every brand, Seagate and WD included
none are immune
nor is cloud storage
Apple decided out of the blue to delete all my older photos of my late cats off my iPad because it was almost full
ALMOST
because I didn't want to pay for more
I often looked at those photos
fortunately they are backed up on my PC
... on a 12TB drive that could one day fail
I have a Synology NAS with Raid 6 and 16 TByte. This is additionally back-uped on an external HD. So far this works.
Besides portable hard drives, I also use retired hard drives as backups of backups. After my painful experience, I made three to four backups of all my work. In addition, you should keep at least one backup of an older version, so that if you find out you made a mistake later (such as saving the wrong file), you still have a chance to recover it.
...had this happen several years ago. lost about 6 years worth of work. At the time I considered throwing in the towel. The "muse" is still sometimes elusive, particularly having to recreate characters and rebuild lost scenes form square one again. Characters are the toughest part as I too have been kitbashing original characters for about as long as I've been at this. To recreate anything exactly as it was is often an exercise in frustration and discouragement, particularly when a new generation figure base comes along as it means starting all over once again..
Even though it's been years the "recovery/rebuilding" process has been tedious and slow and there are still times the creative energy is just not there..
[edited to correct number of typos as it was early AM and I was tired which seems to "amplify" my dyslexia]
oh I've been through this few times including on a certain website and online saves including artwork and personal videos/photos sadly of my most precious non human friends family
Late last year I was many hours deep in an experimental project and got way too tired, and accidentally deleted the entire project directory from a SSD. Extensive data recovery efforts saved just a few corrupted unopenable files. As long as we have the skills and desire to create more art, we're unstoppable, but it super sucks for morale when there's major/catastrophic setbacks. Good luck moving forward and remember you didn't lose the skills/experience you picked up from your efforts!
I've read that the enclosure bits (cable, controller, power elements) of external Seagate drives often fail while the drive inside could be fine. If it's a portable external seagate, maybe shucking the drive (removing it from its plastic enclosure) could get it to spin up with one of those usb connector kits for data recovery.
If you get an SSD you'll probably welcome the performance boost, but beware they're even harder to recover data than HDDs so backups are extra important.
Edit: do your research first, taking external hard drives out of their enclosures typically voids the warranty, and not all of them connect to typical sata cables due to proprietary designs. I think the portable Seagates can usually be disassembled but Western Digital is a lot more spotty.
Deepest sympathies to you and everyone else who's experienced catastrophic data loss. That hurts just to read.
So sorry!
Four decades ago, I wiped out both my copies of a painstakingly created fantasy map I really liked, by making a mistake while moving it. Since then I have "If you don't have 3 copies, you don't have any" tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.
<grumble> I now have to buy a new hard drive, because real soon now the graphics collection is going to overwhelm the older disk set they're stored on and I'll only have 2 copies. Which I will not risk.
Three backups, there must be,
Fate is forever following thee.
Unprepared or careless. You'll see.
I know, it's happend to me.
...a lesson once learned shoud never be fogotten.
Back in the late '60 or early '70s I was working in the computer lab at Florida Institute of Technology. Nearby a few miles south of the college was a big defense contractor. A friend from college worked in their corporate computer facilities. That was back in the day when a disk drive was as big as a top loading washing machine and the storage platters cassettes were like a half dozen LP records on a stick in a tall cake pan holding a few megabytes of storage (state of the art at the time). one day while talking with my friend he relayed the story of his department having a data loss on one of the cakepan data casettes so they pulled the duplicate off the shelf and stuffed it into the washing machine. Oops, same problem, so the gung-ho data manager went to the safe and pulled out the 3rd copy and put it into the same washing machine. OMG, same problem. All out of backups. Corporate data boogered. But they still had the data on original paper documents and some in punched cards, but it was a long painful job to recreate & rebuild the database. Closing the barn door after the horse is stolen, the data manager called the computer center systems engineer who studied the problem and determined that the "washing machine" that had been used had a crashed head, that had scratched every disk platter inserted. All they would have had to have done was to use one of the other washing machines, especially after the 2nd failure. Good job guys.
I have a 2022 HP windows desktop that had a system drive failure, no problem as I am setting up a spanking brand new HP computer (with a GTX 5090!) and pulled the two data drives out to copy the data to the new computer. Come to find out Windows BitLocker was turned on as delivered and the recovery keys on my Microsoft account don't work to unlock the two data drives. Apparently there was a HP user uproar BitLocker was turned on as delivered and the new computer, fortunately, has BitLocker turn off by default. Had no backups of course. Learned my lesson to keep BitLocker turned off and backup to a 14tb external hooked up to my router.
If you have Windows Bitlocker turned on, a yellow "lock" will display on your drive icons. If you know what it is and have saved recovery keys, good for you. If not, inform yourself or turn it off in control panel.
Fortunately I had important docs, particularily spreadsheets on my OneDrive account that was backed up. I have a bad habit of storing files on the desktop and all of those files were backed up too. I can live with loosing the data (lesson learned) but rebuilding my Daz and third party purchase library is gonna take a while.
I did backup/recovery planning for the last ten years of my career. It's not enough to do regular backups - you need to verify that files can be retrieved from the backups. Pull a file or directory off the backup and compare it to the original at least once a quarter. I read a number of horror stories over that ten years of sites finding their backup media was unreadable or the procedure they used didn't actually back everything up.