Friday I had a little shock. I’d had a few problems uploading images from a CF card into Lightroom. I’d come home, set everything up as usual and the gon e away to enjoy a cup of tea and a slice of cake (Linda’s Simnel cake, a sticky marzipan rich Easter treat) and came back to the computer around an hour later to get on with processing the images to find only about 25 of them had been imported.
It’s something that seems to happen occasionally with LR, and one of the bugs I’d hoped might get sorted out when I recently upgraded to LR 3.4, but unfortunately it’s still there. Adobe doesn’t have a great record at fixing bugs either in LR or in Photoshop, and I suspect don’t spend a great deal of effort with those that are intermittent or possibly only affect a minority of users.
The only answer I’ve found is to quit LR and try again, and quitting is slightly tricky as it seems to be stuck in some kind of state that makes Windows Task Manager the only way to do this. It also seems worth making sure that you give LR plenty of time after it starts up to get itself sorted out completely – best to find something else to do for a few minutes before trying the import again.
Then usually the second time it will work quite happily at a decent speed. As it did Friday for several hundred images. Then one of those incomprehensible Windows error message appeared on screen, telling me that a delayed write had failed and my work had been lost. Somewhere it mentioned $I at the start of an otherwise to me meaningless string of characters, and I guessed it meant a problem with my backup drive.
LR continued happily – it had almost finished anyway – and when it did so, confirmed my guess, telling me that it had been unable to write the backup copies of ten files. This is a message I’ve seen before, when there hasn’t been sufficent space on the drive, but since I knew that the hard drive in question had more than 1.5 terabytes empty, this seemed rather unlikely. Perhaps I had managed to change the backup destination by accident to a drive with rather less free space? I checked on LR and it was still directed to my large, almost empty external drive.
It was after midnight and I was tired, but I wanted to get this sorted out, and went into ‘My Computer’ only to get a shock – my backup drive was no longer there. I checked the actual drive, on the desk next to me, and found the small green light on the back was not on, again telling me it wasn’t connected.
Two cables run into the back of the drive, a USB and a 12v power cable, and both were still firmly in place. I have been known to pull out a cable by accident (and when someone pulls a vacuum cleaner around the room I often find keyboard or mouse have gone AWOL) but both seemed fine. The USB cable is easy to check, and goes into to a cheap and nasty USB hub, so I removed it and plugged it directly into the computer. Rather than checking the power cable, which disappeared into a tangle of wires, I pulled the 12v supply from another external drive and plugged that in place. Nothing happened, so I tried restarting the system, as I got ready for bed. Still no drive and I went to bed cursing that my backup drive was dead.
I woke up in the middle of the night, around 05.30 for the usual reason, just one of the joys of growing old. Usually I’m asleep again more or less as my head hits the pillow on coming back to bed (and very occasionally before, which can be more painful) but instead last night I was awake worrying about what I should do about the loss of my backup.
Of course it wasn’t really a disaster, but things always seem pretty bleak in the middle of the night. I still had at least one copy of everything that was on the backup on my main computer. A backup is a backup after all, although it would take quite a time to recreate it – and time when with just a single copy on my hard disk the work would be vulnerable.
As well as the original RAW files, I also make high quality jpegs of my selected images which are stored on a different drive in my computer. At some point I burn my RAW files a month at a time onto DVDs, and after doing that can delete these RAW files from my computer to make space for new ones.
People often tell me that neither external hard drives or DVDs are long term storage. I’m relying on a new, high capacity storage medium becoming available before both the DVDs and the hard drives fail. Or civilisation as we know it collapsing, when perhaps the last thing anyone including myself will be concerned about is conserving my images.
Saturday morning, with a slightly clearer mind, I crawled on the floor and traced back the power cable from the drive. Rather to my surprise it didn’t take me back to a transformer built into a plug on one two multiple boards under the desk to my left. Instead it went to a small black box more or less under my feet. Which was connected to nothing, but had a socket with two pints for one of those small ended twin 240 volt leads, which was minding its own business a few inches away. The same type of lead that plugs into my battery charger and is only too easily kicked out of place.
I connected the two, fired up the computer and was relieved to find that several months of backup were still there. Just those ten missing files that needed copying over. And some lost sleep I can do nothing about.
Perhaps the other power lead I tried also is unconnected – I should check some time. It is useful to think now and then about what you would do if disaster strikes, but I’d prefer to sleep. My next disaster is likely to be the computer I’m typing this on failing terminally. What would I do then?