[RKDinOKC]

The first drive I sent off to Drive Savers was a Raid array that had crashed and would not reboot. The controller died and farkled the drives.

You need to check, the last drive I recovered Drive Savers had software I downloaded and was able to access and pull stuff off a drive that would power up but not mount or be recognized by the computer without their software. It was not all that expensive.

Remember and old computer book, I think it was The Tao of Macintosh, Had the 10 comandments of computers.

1. Computers are fun.
2. Easy is hard.
3. One, Two, Three many backups.

For my computers I have 3 main backups.

1. An Apple Time Machine backup.
Does hourly backups of changes in the background.
Keeps hours backups for 24 hours.
Keeps Daily backups for a Month.
Keeps Monthly backup for as long as your have drive space with oldest deleted when drive full

2. A Bootable backup that is updated nightly on a drive for each computer.

3. Bootable backups also made to partitions on a drive that is fireproof and waterproof.

Can easily find and restore individual files and/or versions of files from Time Machine backup.
Was able to restore Glen's MIL's email she had accidentally deleted.

Can restore a computer from either the time machine (slow) or bootable backups (plug in and boot).
Was able to get a server back on-line in minutes that the raid array had crashed on.

If there is a catastrophe can use the bootable backups on the fireproof/waterproof drive.

The server and all the drives that keep my backups cost me 20watts. Checked it with my Watt Miser thingy.

My Photos are in the app Photos (formerly iPhoto) on my Mac. It is also backed up to my iCloud account as is my Music that is in iTunes. Can also access either from any device.

Used to be incharge of all the data files for the drafting/engineering department. The problems wasn't keeping the backups. It was keeping the data in a file format that could still be accessed. Most of the literature and drawings we made PDFs for archival backups and highest quality jpegs for photos.

Several years ago a friend of mine passed away that had all his family photos in iPhoto. His photo library was HUGE. So big that I helped him set up iPhoto to keep the library on an external drive. He also had an iCloud account and paid for extra storage over the basic 5GB. His family still uses his computer as their photo album.

One of my nephew's wife keeps all their family photos in iPhoto and uses the book feature and buys books to print out nicely bound high quality printed photo albums with captions.

The founder of the company I work for had a large photo library of negative and slides. I went thru several boxes of slides and scanned them in and uploaded them to a photo library program. Family members can access and go thru it with a web browser and add captions to the photos for things they remember. One of the family members retired husband took over. He downloaded all the photos and copied them to CD and sent copies of the CD to everyone. The photos I didn't scan he just scanned a copied to a CD and sent copies out.