Hi, Recently my system got crashed and I lost my data. Tried recovering it but all corrupted. 

The external HDD I had some backup on is also not reading.

Can anyone guide me the personal procedure you guys follow to take backups?
Or what is the industry standard for taking backups?

I am using backblaze for years: affiliate link:  https://secure.backblaze.com/r/01nw5k

I maintain three sets of external drives.  140tb total data stored. 

I maintain three sets of external drives.  140tb total data stored.

That sounds pretty good. Something similar.

Desktop hard drive: Current Year and past two years.
Internal Hard drive: all years, all images (made as I go, mostly monthly)
External USB Hard drive: all years, all images (when I think of it)

Hi, Recently my system got crashed and I lost my data. Tried recovering it but all corrupted. 

The external HDD I had some backup on is also not reading.

Can anyone guide me the personal procedure you guys follow to take backups?
Or what is the industry standard for taking backups?

Seems odd that the external is not working as well. Have you tried it on a different computer? Unless you had some kind of lightning strike or EMF blast?

There is no standard. People pay a bunch of money for Carbonite (or similar data storage), I prefer HHD and various copies, on the computer and external. I suppose I'll add, I do use old smaller internal drives - from laptops or desktops that I retired, and back up years, and put those on the book shelf. You could also have a RAID drive with disk array which is internally redundant. 4T of drives will back up 2T of data.

I don't backup. My pictures are not worth a backup HDD.
If the images are lost, its lost. I don't care.
Though i have found that its easier and better to shoot new images than search for old images on HDD.

I tend to agree with that philosophy, yet I still back up for some unknown reason. Maybe it's just for the old pictures and events, but not for the stock photos. Because of the nature of sports, the images are one time and gone and can't be re-created. Wildlife, comes and goes, maybe a rare bird or animal, but otherwise, they are out there to be found again.

But for stock, like you say, I could probably make a new, better version of almost anything I've done before.

Hello Artist,

 I'm sorry you're having a hard drive crash. Data recovery software might help you. I've had problems with
a memory card and the software to restore almost all data. I used Wondershare Recoverit.
As far as I know there is also a free trial version. There are also some local providers who can
repair damaged hard drives or save the data. However, this is often associated with higher costs.

Best regards from Germany Photohom

Yes, I am in follow-up with local data recovery agent. They are investigating it and hopefully give me some positive news.

My main system is a RAID 5 rack.
RAID 5 is ensuring seamless protection against 1 HDD failure (the system continues to operate with only 4 HDDs).
Besides the protection against failures, the system has a much faster read speed, because it reads data from all HDDs at the same time. I switch the rack on only when I work on photos/videos.

Additionaly, I regularly back up critical data from this RAID5 on a second smaller RAiD5 AND on a single high capacity HDD, which are otherwise always switched off.

I also save all my JPEGs on Amazon Photos.

All this, because years ago I also lost a no back-up HDD and I still feel the pain.

I can understand the data lost pain. Going through it now.
Can you share any tutorial which guides the procedure for RAID5?

I have a double backup 2 hard drives, switching them every week - software used :  Mirrorfolder. This protects me against crashes, but also against my own stupid mistakes like deleting files by accident.  Mirrorfolders makes a simple COPY of the files.  But local backup does not protect against theft or fire, so I also have a Backblaze subscription.  I have about 9 Tb so the initial backup to Backblaze took about a month, but you don't even notice that, it's all automatic (and very cheap, a LOT cheaper than hard drives).

Backblaze, backs up my whole computer around 5 bucks per month. They will mail you a drive with all archived data for a reasonable fee too.

pCloud all the way.

thanks for mentioning backblaze!

i registered & started my initial backup which finished today (3 Tb)  i was able to use 12 threads

Macrium Reflect has a free software version for home use (if you are a small user). I use it to record backups. I cycle 3 external USB 3 drives. Two drives are always stored in a media rated fire vault (although would be better to be stored off site). I have 190, 000 photos in my database and run a full system backup, with verify, about once per week. Start it when I go to bed and it takes 11 to 13 hours. A couple of my drives are 8TB so can store more than one backup copy on those drives. With 3 external drives I have maybe 6 - 9 backups in historical storage. A person can never have too many backups in too many places. Consider a plan that covers the possible events of weather storm, fire, or earthquake, that takes out your working building and neighborhood.

All my images/clips are on an external hard drive that is backed up to two additional hard drives with Time Machine on a Mac.  I intend to keep one backup drive at a different location and switch them out periodically in case of a fire but usually am not organized enough and they are all at home.

Hope you can recover your files.