Picture nightmare

Just to explain my desperation, our La Cie external hard drive has died that contained 5 years worth of photos - baby phots, family - all very precious... This could be the first of a number of questions.

I've found some of the lost photos as attachments to e-mails in my sent e-mail box in Mail. I'm trying to import these into iPhoto, though haven't succeeded yet. I've been highlighting the photos (.jpg) from the sent e-mail, and saving into a folder (Pictures/iPhoto Library/...DSC....jpg). Then, from iPhoto, I've tried to import to library, highlighted all of the photos in the folder (above) and then clicked import, only to be told that the files could not be read. I'm using OSX 10.5.8 on a G5 desk top computer.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better way to import the photos from the sent e-mails into iPhoto? All help aimed at a computer-gimp level greatly appreciated...

Questions to follow on how best to save large volumes of photos (my Wife is a photography teacher and prolific photographer) have previously used iPhoto Librarian to save different libraries when they get to a sufficiently large size; and how to back up - possibly a solid state hard drive and cloud/DVD/mor memory space on my computer (I think I've got 2-3 spare slots).

Thanks in advance.

I've learnt the hard way not to trust an external hard drive (La Cie in this case) to store libraries of iPhoto to, having just lost 5-year's worth of images. And so, I'm almost starting afresh...

What is the best method to save large volumes of photos? My Wife is a photography teacher and prolific photographer, and we've previously used iPhoto Librarian to save different libraries (to the external hard drive) when iPhoto gets too large and takes ages to open.

Also, any recommendations on the best way to back these up? I'm envisaging still using iPhoto Librarian and saving toy a solid state hard drive, backed up by something else - cloud/DVD/more memory space on my computer (I think I've got 2-3 spare slots)?

I'm a bit of a computer gimp, so please reply at a suitable level! Cheers

The key to any important files backup - is redundancy. There are several ways to achieve this - but any single point of failure is bad news. External hard drives are probably the easiest way to save data - but I have several drives with my photos on them. Another thought is to put at least 1 drive - once a month - into a safe deposit box in case anything happens to your home (fire, robbery, etc) You could use a 2-3 drive system where you cycle one drive into the box and hav another drive backing up. In theory this would mean a one month loss at most - but it takes dedication to do such things.

I also pay the $45/2 years for Flickr - as an online backup. I actually picked up an eye-fi card. This card allows me to dump photos to a locally attached computer on the network - as well as auto-upload to Flickr.
Eye-Fi memory cards: wireless photo and video uploads from your camera to your computer & the web. | Eye-Fi
You can upload to various other sites as well.

There are also raid boxes and backup solutions - You want mirroring (raid 1) or raid 5 or 6 - this helps with single point failure. Raid is more about uptime - but you could use the same rotating disk scheme if you use raid 5 with backup or raid 6.
Standard RAID levels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Synology makes an all in one box if you don't want to build one.
Synology Network Attached Storage - NEW NAS Experience
Amazon.com: Synology DiskStation 5-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage (DS1512+): Computers & Accessories

We always warn folks about storing photos on hard drives, whether internal or external. Hard drives fail and they do it without warning.

Since your wife is a photography teacher and you have lots of photos to store, my suggestion is to buy a Blue Ray burner and burn those photos to BR disks. You can burn them to DVDs if you don't want to spend money on a BR burner.

How you go about restoring the photos you lost is up to you. Getting them from emails will work but I'm sure there will be lots of photos that are missing.

You may be able to get your photos off the LaCie by using special software. I suggest using Disk Warrior. If the drive can be accessed, Disk Warrior should be able to retrieve your photos. Here is the LINK.

I had a 500gb Lacie drive that gave the impression that it had died: funny noises, couldn't access it, verify it etc etc. Having replaced it, I decided to take it apart and see what was inside, and found, to my surprise, two 250gb hard discs.

On the assumption that both couldn't have failed, I put one in a spare enclosure, and it worked fine. And so did the other one! It wasn't a drive failure, but an enclosure/power supply failure.

So, it may be worthwhile putting the actual drive in another enclosure, just incase.

@jonnybird:

Please do not cross post (posting to more than one forum) the same or related subjects. Keep your posts to one forum and continue posting the that same forum. I've combined both your threads here.

MightyGem said:

I had a 500gb Lacie drive that gave the impression that it had died: funny noises, couldn't access it, verify it etc etc. Having replaced it, I decided to take it apart and see what was inside, and found, to my surprise, two 250gb hard discs.

On the assumption that both couldn't have failed, I put one in a spare enclosure, and it worked fine. And so did the other one! It wasn't a drive failure, but an enclosure/power supply failure.

So, it may be worthwhile putting the actual drive in another enclosure, just incase.

Click to expand...

This. In a lot of cases, it's not the actual hard drive that fails with an external, but the enclosure unit. Take it apart and find another enclosure, they're cheap.

Good suggestions here. Redundancy is key. You can also do the "cloud thing", and back up to places like Mozy, Dropbox, Carbonite etc etc..

Doug

A simple backup (Time Machine or any other method you choose) would have saved you a lot of heartache.

Even time machine can be a single point of failure. I also found out the hard way - my original time capsule died after 18 months. It was a power supply issue and I was able to extract the drive - but I started backing up to another external hard drive located at my work. If you are backing up to just 1 hard drive/location - you are taking a big risk.