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General discussion

Photo Data Crisis

Sep 7, 2010 4:17PM PDT

Hi, I was copying some very precious photos off my external to my internal HDD running windows 7, when I came back about an hour later I had a message that some photos could not be copied over because they had been deleted or misplaced. I went back to the source files to check and I got the same message when trying to open despite that I can see the thumbnails clearly, tried using alternative photo viewing programs and received similar errors. Strangely when I opened the copied over photos they work fine. What's going on? The anxiety is killing me.

Discussion is locked

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Worse than thought
Sep 7, 2010 4:24PM PDT

Apparently the whole back up folder will not open any files due to same error, the majority of photos do not even have their thumbnails but still read the appropriate data sizes

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HDD
Sep 7, 2010 4:31PM PDT

Apparently my ext HDD crashed, its a western digital mybook so this is unexpected, photos are viewable again, but could someone tell me of a secure way to remove photos from HDD besides copy and pasting?

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Not sure where you are with this now
Sep 7, 2010 10:58PM PDT

but the general advice is, backup, backup, backup.

That's 3 times. It works like this. If you have just one working copy of a file, eg a photo, then if that file gets deleted, or the hard drive fails, or the Operating System fails and you need to reinstall, then that file is lost.

So, one backup of that file works but only if the copy is elsewhere than on that original hard drive. A different partition on the same hard drive doesn't work because if the drive fails, then you are in the same position.

But two backups are better. With two backups, if you lose the original file then just one backup becomes the original, that is, no backup. So two backups prevent that.

But three backups ensures that at least one of your backups always works.

All backups must be on different media to the original, and on different media to each other.

As to your question, removing photos from the hard drive without copy/paste, I am not sure what your intention is. You can delete the files and that removes them, but I am sure you don't mean that. Other than Cut/Paste or Copy/Paste, there is no other way to remove them.

Mark