I had one of those awful moments last night: I had an external LaCie 1TB hard drive with 20,000+ photos on it (and some movies) attached to my MacBook Pro, when the LaCie failed.  I was in the middle of cleaning up my Lightroom catalog, moving things around from my MacBook Pro to the LaCie, when it happened.

I have known it has not been an ideal set up for some time:  I have a MacBook Pro with a relatively small solid state drive (256GB), hence having to periodically move things around between the laptop and external USB hard drives.

Thankfully, I have an Apple Time Capsule configured to run auto back-ups.  Unfortunately, the external hard drive died just as the Time Capsule was mid-way through a back-up cycle. I have been able to recover the contents of the LaCie drive from the day before when it was last attached, and have copied these to a different external hard drive (it is taking an eternity). 

So, upshot is, I don't think I have lost anything: the worst thing is my Lightroom catalog is now a complete mess because the recovered back-up does not reflect all the re-organisation just before the crash.  Once all the images are received from the Time Capsule, I expect it will be a nightmare trying to re-link all those folders/image files in the Library, which reflect the changes made, to the recovered but old file structure.

Anyway, it prompted me to finally do what I should have done 6 months ago: I went and ordered a new 27" iMac with a 3TB Fusion drive, firstly, for increased storage and, secondly, to have a large screen to work on. 

I also have a 100GB Dropbox account, but have not been making the best use of it because kept running out of space on the MacBook before I could fill Dropbox, so I mainly use for documents.  In fact, had just moved some folders out of the Dropbox folder before the crash, so didn't have any backups there.  I also have the free Adobe CC cloud storage, but don't really use that.  Likewise, I have 20GB Apple Cloud, but I don't use that for photos.

Anyway, it got me wondering what others do about backup.  Hard drive or cloud, or both?  How many copies? How often?  I was lucky this time, but I think I need to improve my recovery strategy.

1 NAS for daily use;
1 external hard drive for backup, syncronized daily;
1 external hard drive at my parents' home, syncronized about once a month; unfortunately it's in the same city/country so it's not completely safe against natural disasters / wars / revolutions but still...;
1 dvd (lately, bluray) - I don't know how long optical media will last, but are safer against human-error since can't be deleted;
1 mostphotos;

I should be really unlucky to lose all those copies at once.

Hope you'll get your photos back ok. Tiding up the mess in Lightroom can always be done... losing the master files is GAME OVER.
"Fortunately", I learned my lesson long time before I went professional when I lost chunk of my personal photos, so I've been careful since then.

My back up strategy:
Hourly: 2TB Time Machine - to retrieve accidentally deleted files and to restore computer when it dies one day. Includes full photo library.
Weekly: 2TB external drive to hold copy of my whole photo library. Sync with ChronoSync.
Monthly: Cloud backup - I use LiveDrive. All my important files including full photo library are there in case of massive disaster.
+ Occasional: Backup to Mac mini in my parents' house which I use as remote rendering server.
+ 20GB Dropbox for files I currently work on.

Fortunately, even when my iMac blew up, I've never had to go further back than to my Time Machine to restore lost files... yet