Lost a whole drawing because of a busted backup drive

My external Seagate 2TB drive failed on me last Thursday right in the middle of a project for a commercial build in Austin. I thought I was safe keeping a copy on there plus my desktop, but my desktop auto-saved over the good file with a messed up layer. Lost about 6 hours of work on the HVAC layout and had to redo it from a PDF printout. Has anyone else had a drive just quit like that with no warning?

2 comments

2 Comments

gibson.sean1d ago

That bit about the desktop auto-saving over your good file is the kind of thing that haunts you. I've had a WD drive click a few times then just go silent mid-save, no warning lights or anything. What I started doing after that was keeping three copies including a dumb old offline drive I only plug in once a week. Might not hurt to set up some kind of versioning software too so even if something saves over your good copy you can roll back a few steps.

diana_flores251d agoMost Upvoted

And honestly that whole approach applies to more than just hard drives at this point. Everything digital moves so fast now that having a backup plan and a way to undo stuff seems like common sense for just about anything. It's like we all learned the hard way that trusting one copy of anything is a gamble.