Near disaster this week: my Seagate hardrive, repository of rougly 700 gigs of photos, suddenly stopped working. With no warning the drive disappeared from Windows, and even the bios wouldn’t recognize it. Minor panic as I realized that though I have an extra copy of every raw file on the drive (I make backups as I download each photo with Downloader Pro), I did not have backups of my photoshop files created over the last few months. Also, since I hadn’t backed up recently, restoring my download backups would mean deleting, again, raw files that I’d already examined and discarded once. Not fun. Plus recovering and organzing the backup raw files would be a pain, since the backups reside on a least three different systems.

To make a long story short, the drive was rendered inoperable by a firmware bug. Not so hot on Seagate’s part. But, much to their credit, Seagate arranged to have the drive overnighted to them — they paid for shipping and even for the cost to package the drive. A tech called me the next day, telling me that he’d fixed the firmware and that the drive was fixed and on its way back. I should be back up and running by shortly.

So, while I’m not happy about the firmware bug, I was very impressed by how well Seagate handled the repair. Doubly impressed, because I bought the drive as a “bare” OEM drive, and I expected to get a hassle about the warranty.

Of course, my images will now live on a RAID system, so I won’t lose any data even if I lose a drive. And I’ll be better (really!) about offsite backups.