I keep all my photos and my Lightroom Catalog on an External portable hard drive. That way I can easily work on my pictures either on my iMac desktop or my MacBook Pro while I'm sitting watching TV or when I'm on the road.

This morning I was sitting in the living room with my MacBook on my lap and the portable drive plugged in processing some new pics. Suddenly my wife called me, "come quick you gotta see this!" (turns out it was a neighborhood cat stretching up to drink from the bird bath). I quickly moved my MBP to the table in front of me without thinking and, you guessed it, the portable drive hit the hardwood floor!

Luckily, the drive can still be read (I can still see and move/copy files) but when I plug it in now, I get an error that the drive is damaged and OS X can't repair it and that I can still read files but can't write to the disk. The warning says to do a full backup of the drive and re-format, which I'm in the process of doing now. In other words, I can see files and move them to another drive, but I can't write to the drive.

Thankfully, I do monthly backups of this drive and also I don't delete pictures from my CF and SD cards until I really need to, but always make sure I'm fully backed up to the "MyCloud Mirror" before I delete files from the cards. This way, if I do damage my portable hard drive to the point that I could not recover anything, I'd not lose any pictures, and in the worst case I might not have the latest LR catalog and may have to re-import from the cards and do some processing on a month's worth of pictures.

I'm currently doing a backup of the damaged drive to my "MyCloud Mirror" (RAID) drive and will re-format the portable drive, then re-copy everything. What a pain, but hopefully noting will have been lost.