Imagine being at your favorite local café working on photography or cinematography edits late night on your laptop. You are stressed out and tired from a long day of shooting. Your stomach is growling for a bite to eat. Your eyes feel heavy like tea bags steeping in a mug. Your brain is light as a feather lost in outer space. You suddenly fall asleep.
THUMP!!!
You immediately wake up and find your hard drive on the floor! OH FRIGGEN SH*T!
Worried, you immediately grab your hard drive and plug it into your laptop. Nothing. You try mounting the hard drive on your desktop. Nothing. You try ejecting the hard drive. Nothing. You check Disk Utility to see if it is readable. Nothing. You manually restart your computer. Nothing………. and nothing…… and nothing… and nothing.. NOTHING!
WTF!!!!
The following may have happened:
- Your hard drive was NOT-ejected properly and became unreadable.
- Your hard drive is physically damaged and cannot function properly
- You have lost your ENTIRE hard drive data with ALL of your IMPORTANT Files that you may have not backed up!
Thank God for Wondershare, and their LIFE-SAVING software, Data Recovery I was able to recover of the original photos from the tournament! Whew!
If it weren’t for companies like Wondershare, I would probably be working a 9-to-5 job I may hate and you would have never seen this story and benefit from my experience.
This was a problem. A SERIOUS problem, especially for a wedding photographer. And it happened to me a few times after my horrifying 2009 experience, and I needed a solution to it.
So I made a cheap, quick, simple, DIY Hack!
DIY HACK for Portable External Hard Drive Accidental Drops, Damages, Disconnection, and Data Loss.
MATERIALS
- VELCRO Brand Industrial Strength Black (comes in rolls or strips)
- Reusable Hook & Loop Cable Tie (I prefer small/mini sizes, any brand)
- Gaffers Tape
INSTRUCTIONS
- Cut a 2-3 inch strip of Industrial Strength Velcro
- Cleaned the bottom of my Seagate portable hard drive (the preferred brand I use for standard portable hard drives is Seagate) with Zeiss Lens Cleaning Wipes (that I absolutely can’t live without). NOTE: I have upgraded to SSD Samsung T1 mini hard drives for more stability, toughness, and minimize failure rates
- Attached the Velcro Hook (rough side) to the bottom of my hard drive.
- Repeated Step 2, attaching the Velcro Loop (soft side) to the outer shell (behind monitor screen) of my Macbook Pro, positioning it towards the center bottom 1/3rd.
- Stuck my hard drive to my Macbook Pro.
USB CORD
- I attached USB cable into the hard drive
- Used Gaffers Tape to secure the cable from being removed by. See Photos. (I taped it permanently for convenience and accidental detachment from hard drive).
OPTIONAL for USB CORD
For the USB Cord you can wrap it around your hard drive in a way that it is secure when storing in your laptop bag or with your laptop closed and hard drive USB cord detached/safely ejected. Another method I have done is use another piece of Velcro Loop (soft side) which was placed on the center top 1/3rdbehind my monitor screen of my Macbook Pro and used a mini reusable Hook and Loop Cable Tie wrapped around and secured onto the free male end of the USB cable that can allow for clean fastening onto the top center piece of Velcro.
With this DIY hack, my hard drive accidental drops/disconnections/data loss troubles have diminished dramatically and I can edit with a peace of mind!
