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Lost: 40 GB of Files…A Backup Nightmare

A few months back I began running out of room on my internal hard drive. I decided that it was time to clean files and move a few things around. Well I moved all my “non-priority” files and my music to an external hard drive. It started giving me a headache with the music, but that is another story.

I kept all the data I was working on regularly on the internal drive and archived to the external…manually. Realizing I was opening myself up for a major issue in not actually backing up my internal drive, I bought another external drive. I then bought a third to deal with the growing music problem. I manually moved my music top the biggest of the drives and set the smallest up as a daily backup of my internal drive using Carbon Copy Cloner.

A couple days later I noticed there was an “issue” that wasn’t clearly defined in the log file for Carbon Copy Cloner, so I redid the backup routine and deleted the old one. Then I started noticing heavy usage on my Pictures hard drive (the original external), but with the holiday didn’t look into it. Well tonight I was doing work and looked for some files I had stored on the orignal external and found out they were gone. The entire drive had been renamed to match my backup drive. It had my backup, deleting everything that was on it, and the new dirve that was for the backup had nothing.

Most of what was on there, I have saved from a previous computer transfer, but I do not know if my latest round of photos from California or the Milwaukee Kite festival made onto DVDs (I usually burn them in RAW format right after taking them from the cards). So it looks like I will have a busy weekend going through all my disks and trying to recover as much as possible. Well at least this way I can update my Flickr account and post a few more images from the archives…if I find them.

The moral of the story, disconnect all drives except the backup when running the backup the first time.

Update

I have gone through most of my files and found the ones that were of most concern to me, but a few things were lost none the less. I have the backup software running right now and it kicks in daily.