Pro tip: check your backup drive actually works before 3 AM

My external drive failed at 2 AM while I was finishing a project for a Seattle client. Lost 6 hours of edits because I assumed my weekly backups were running. Had to pull an all-nighter redoing everything from memory. Anyone else had a backup tool let them down at the worst time?

3 comments

3 Comments

matthewking18d ago

Ugh, that's brutal. I had a similar thing happen with a backup tool that just silently stopped syncing to my cloud drive one month because the file path got too long or something. Now I manually do a test restore from my backup every few months just to be sure it actually works.

logan27118d ago

That's a rough one man, literally a full year of photos just gone like that. I feel for you @matthewking, especially since it's one of those things where you think you're doing everything right. I had a scare a few years back where I lost about three months of stuff from a similar silent failure, and it's made me paranoid about it ever since. Now I do a full manual check of my backup files on an external drive every other month or so, just to spot anything weird before it gets too bad. It's a pain, but way less of a pain than trying to recover from a total loss like that.

danielowens17d ago

Three years ago I would have told you this was overkill. I figured as long as the software said it backed up, everything was fine. Then my uncle lost his entire tax folder because a backup tool crashed mid-sync and just never told him. He didn't find out until April 14th. That changed my whole view on this. Now I do the same thing you do - pull a random file from my backup once a quarter and see if it actually opens. It takes five minutes and has already caught two failures on my end. Small price to pay for peace of mind.