[Athiril]

I am a film and digital shooter. I have EVERY shot I have ever taken on film going back 40 years. I have a good file system and can find ANY negative or slide within a minute or two.

I am also a tech savy person and have been building my own home computers since the late 1970s. That was BEFORE the PC existed. I also began programing at that time.

I currently own a Pentax K5 DSLR but also own and continue to use about a dozen film cameras. My favorites are the Pentax K2 and MX, PZ-1P and MZ-S, and finally 645. I still bring out the old Kodaks, AGFAs and Yashicas on occasion.

I back up my computer every other day with a rolling backup and I keep several copies of by back up on more then one hard drive. So it would be IMPOSSIBLE to lose anything. WRONG!

With my digital files I often copy them to my computer at the end of the day. Once a month or so catalog, tag etc the photos and file them in a different archive folder on the hard drive. Well last time I did so all of the files for the 6 week period were corrupt. I could see the image name on the hard drive and they files were the correct size BUT if I tried to open them I go an error and no image.

Well I have SIX copes of these folders backed up on TWO external Hard Drives. One must be good. ALL are corrupt. I lost over 6 weeks of shots. Many were valuable and cannot be replaced.

FILM RULES!!!!

Practise proper backup technique with ALL important data. Using multiple backups is good, but not to identical media type in the same physical storage location. Same reason RAID1 is not a backup, mess it up on one, it happens to both. Faulty controller? Say good bye to both.

In any case, recovery software often helps, you can rebuild corrupt master file tables, and also data recovery software, chances with good software is usually pretty good, as it's usually not a hardware issue (faulty read/write heads, bad sectors, etc) esp when happened to both.

I'd recommend backing up to another place, if you live in a country with lots of bandwidth and large data allowances, use some kind of online dropbox, or buy some web hosting and ftp it there, optical media is a good choice too (when you use a quality burner, which is pretty much Pioneer brand by a long margin, along with quality discs, which would be Taiyo Yuden, or rebranded Taiyo Yudens, or the Inorganic Dye Verbatims (non-LTH ones, dont get organic dye Verbatims), stay away from "noname"/low end tier discs such as Sony, TDK, etc).

If shooting digital, and it's paid... just write off the cost of the memory card, don't reuse it, and archive it somewhere safe, that's indexed and filed.. or at least buy slower speed memory cards and store it on there.