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Comment on Windows 11 user has 30 years of 'irreplaceable photos and work' locked away in OneDrive - and Microsoft's silence is deafening

tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

I was consolidating data from multiple old drives before a major move—drives I had to discard due to space and relocation constraints. The plan was simple: upload to OneDrive, then transfer to a new drive later.

I’m assuming that the reason that he didn’t just do the transfer to a new drive instead of to OneDrive (which seems like it’d be more-straightforward) is because the new drive was going to also be a system disk, not just hold his data.

I think that it would have been a good idea to get a second drive just so that there’s a backup. I mean, it doesn’t really sound like the user was planning to wind up with a backup of his data, or for that matter, that he had a backup to start with.

Maybe OneDrive locking the account was unexpected, but drives can fail or be inadvertently erased or whatever. If you’ve got thirty years of irreplaceable data that you really badly want to keep, I’d want to have more than one copy of it. The cost of a drive to store it is not large compared to the cost involved in producing said data.

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SteevyT@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I have two drives in my tower that are just for my data. They are just folders of files. And there are two because I lost a chunk of data when the single drive it used to be died. Luckily most of it was also elsewhere, but I did think I had lost half of my wedding photos since I couldnt find the flash drive.

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- tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  If you had the photos in question professionally taken, it might be that the photographer, if they’re still around, might have copies. I don’t know whether they retain copies, but I suppose asking can’t hurt.
  
  This place says up to a year:
  
  wanderlustportraits.com/how-long-photographers-ke…
  
  Photographers typically keep photos of their clients for a minimum of 90 days and up to a full year as part of standard practice; however, if this is important to you, review the contract and ask your professional.
  
  This guy says forever:
  
  old.reddit.com/…/how_long_do_you_hold_on_past_wed…
  
  I keep ALL files on two 16tb drives drives. Those drives never get wiped and I will always keep two copies even when they fill up. One internal on sata for reference and one off site. When I first started shouting, I was cheap and deleted RAWs and just kept high res jpegs. I have clients coming back for albums and I am stuck re-editing the jpegs to match in the albums. Lesson learned. If you do want to consolidate, then keep the RAWs of the editor we jpegs and delete the unused. But that’s more hassle than the cost to store unused raws. You can also rely on cloud source but you never know if you’ll ever switch cloud servers or move onto another business on want to stop paying cloud fees. For the high volume photographers it becomes wise to invest in tape drives. HDD have lives of 10 years. So eventually all those old drives will need to be transferred to newer drives. Budget this into your bottom line
  
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  - SteevyT@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    I probably should have worded that better. I found the flash drive they were on. They are now on two mirrored hard drives in my tower, the flash drive, and a cloud service.
    
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