When you’re dealing with a mechanical device, failure is inevitable. It’s a matter of when it will fail, not if. And when will be at the most inopportune moment.

In the case of a hard drive packed with your images, failure without a backup is disastrous. The Drobo I used to store all of my old images went belly up. And it went with little or no warning. Fortunately I had a backup. I was looking for a specific image and noticed several images in the folder were corrupt. I looked in other folders and noticed lots of corrupt files.  Apparently the Drobo had been in its death throes for some time. And my system was running bog slow, a nasty side effect of the dying Drobo. Then it just stopped.

Due to the fact that the Drobo uses a proprietary system for redundancy, the only recourse would have been to buy another Drobo to read the disks, which were probably all corrupt. Due to the cost of a new Drobo, that was not an option. But I had enough in reserve to buy a 5 TB LaCie external drive. And fortunately, I had backups of every folder on the drive, and I had all my Lightroom catalogs stored on another drive as well. So recovery without losing any of my precious images was possible.

The first thing I did was copy the backed-up images to the new drive. In Lightroom, I loaded the catalog for each year. Of course Lightroom could not find the photos because the Drobo was no longer connected to the system.
But the folder structure of the backed-up drive was identical to what was on the Drobo. All I needed to do was select the root folder on the Drobo, and show Lightroom where it currently resided. In a few seconds, Lightroom knew where all the images were and the restoration was complete.

Long story short, back up your image files frequently. Best practice is to create two backups, one copy in your home for easy access, and one copy in an external location in case a disaster like a hurricane or flood should affect your home and destroy the original and the backup.