I would indeed use the replacement to make another copy of your photos. Nothing like having multiple backups.

Since the the freezer is going to change the temp and perhaps humidity (yes it should be sealed and not have humidity change - so call me paranoid when it comes to my data) of the physical drives that doesn't sound like a good idea. Maybe I'm too old school but last winter when I got a new drive delivered I took it out and let it acclimate to the climate inside my condo before I ever plugged it in. It was freezing when I opened it because of it being in the back of a delivery truck.

when I froze it, it worked long enough to rescue the files. I guess it has something to do with heat warping the components.

If you have a drive that refuses to spin up. I've never had that particular problem, have heard of people fixing it that way though. Also heard that it's a terrible terrible idea since the condensation can not only destroy the electronics in the drive but also whatever hardware it's been put into.

It worked long enough.

And as a trained sciencey-dude I know that putting a -10F hard drive into a computer is a terrible idea...for the love of $DEITY use an external case!

This will be much more tedious than just using a clone program but it might be the only way to get the bulk of you pictures.

I'm guessing you don't have all your photos in one big folder. Copy the files manually from the old disk to the new disk folder by folder or several folders at a time. The copy dialog box that's displayed for the progress of the copy should actually let you see what file/folder it get's hung up on when it gets to bad sectors (this is true for Win or Mac). Avoid those folders to begin with and copy everything else.

Then, go back to those folders you couldn't copy as an entire folder because of bad sectors and copy files one by one (or several at a time, again the dialog box should let you see the files that are damaged) from the old folder to a folder on the new drive with the same name.

Hope this helps you save most of your photos. You've probably lost some due to the bad sectors.

I do just what you do and have an external drive for my photos and videos. It's a good way to keep the main disk on the computer clean and from running out of space on that system drive, IMHO. Since they're photos that don't change much I also archive the external drive to DVD (8.5GB discs) or Blu-Ray (25GB discs) from time to time. If your pics are JPGs don't waste time trying to compress them or put them in a ZIP file before archive. JPG's are already compressed so you won't get much out of ZIPing them into a single file.

Good Luck.

So, I used a program (on Mac) called Data Rescue. I was going to copy the files but it told me to clone the drive instead because it was basically dying. I can't see the folders on the drive I need to copy so I'm stuck with cloning and then trying to extract from the good drive.

I will take your advice though and ZIP/RAR my raw files. I shoot all raw so, I'm more concerned about archiving those than the JPGs I use to show on the net.

I just hope the ones that may be lost are old ones and not the newer ones but that isn't the type of luck I usually have.

i have 2 libraries of photos. my pre 2013 ones are stored on a 4tb raid drive (2 tb drives in 1 housing that are clones of each other)
my current year stuff if stored on my macbook pro

for backups both drives are also stroed in the cloud using crshplan

my macbook is also clones onto a seperate drive and i use time machine.

my raid drive is also cloned onto a seperate drive

You may be able to pull the drive itself out of the housing and install it straight in your computer.

Worth a try if nothing else works.

There's no data loss with a single drive failure. The newer ones have a lot more features like web access.

I'll look into it. What are you using?

I'm out of town right now and can't check. It takes laptop sized drives so it's quite small. Most of them made today already have the drives installed so you just plug it into the network and configure it as you want. I also keep my daughters music collection on it and it has an iPod server built in.

that I probably shouldn't have spent. I ended up going with a Qnap... it was between that and the Synology (after much research, these were the two reported to work best with Macs).

But at least I'll have redundant back-up (once I figure out how to make it work).

I think for now, I'll still store my jpgs on portable drives and the raw files on the NAS.

I want a NAS to replace my USB external Time Machine drive - it's getting really annoying to lug around with my MBP, but if I don't backup every day or so the incremental change database (or whatever Time Machine uses, I'm inventing a term there) gets so large it exceeds the capacity of the drive. Me and my girlfriend/lover/soulmate want to back both our lappys up, but a 2 gig Time Capsule is a. stupidly overpriced (2G of "server-grade" drives and a NAS container are like half the price) and b. we don't need the wifi - WRT54G for life!

This is a super-low-level technique that reads the raw data from one drive and writes it to another, creating a bit-for-bit clone. It's not really copying per se - the OS isn't interacting with the data in any way. Just transferring the raw 1s and 0s from one disk to another, even the scrambled ones from bad blocks. You won't damage your new drive, but you may very likely get some corrupted files from the bad sectors; higher-level utilities tend to choke on these which is what makes this a very useful command to know.

So...get both drives mounted and visible in Finder.

Open Terminal and type "diskUtil list". You'll see a screen of cryptic data, thusly:

/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *750.2 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_CoreStorage 749.3 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD *749.0 GB disk1
/dev/disk3
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.1 GB disk3
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk3s1
2: Apple_CoreStorage 499.8 GB disk3s2
3: Apple_Boot Boot OS X 134.2 MB disk3s3
/dev/disk4
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_HFS Time Masheen *499.4 GB disk4
/dev/disk5
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_partition_scheme *5.1 GB disk5
1: Apple_partition_map 32.3 KB disk5s1
2: Apple_HFS ASD 3S144 5.1 GB disk5s2