Back it up people

[Film Street]

I had this error on my master computer yesterday morning. This computer (I'm on it now) is only six weeks old.

This particular error ends with some sound advice from microsoft along the lines of - it's all kewl man, if you don't get it going on our few suggestions
just reinstall windows and start again.

Not too helpfull really. I had not made a disc image so i had to start from scratch reloading programs and settings. I was able to get my files out, what little there were.

I keep everything that matters including photos, on two mirrored drives and a back up external drive.

Now this was a timely reminder for me to image all my OS hard drives before another computer decides to do the same thing (this is a windows 7 problem)

The point here is, are your photos backed up?

Are they really?

I've seen a few cases of digital bye bye. One lady I observed went through it twice. I think she went back to film after that.

But really if it happens to you it's not going to be very funny.

You know who you are. Buy an external drive and back it up.

back it up.jpg

[I @ M]

You know who you are. Buy an external drive and back it up.

Yep, always a timely reminder to save more than one copy of your original file on multiple devices.

I've seen a few cases of digital bye bye. One lady I observed went through it twice. I think she went back to film after that.

And of course, she had her negatives scanned in triplicate and saved to more than just the one shoe box in the wardrobe that went to St Vinnies.

[ricktas]

I have two backup drives, and a NAS. So my photos are all on 4 places at any one time. One of my backup drives lives at a friends house to protect me from fire/theft as well. Having a backup is not going to help if someone breaks in and steals the lot. So I would say make sure you have an 'off-site' backup as well.

[nogi]

Copy and paste from my own blog -

The extent of ones backup regime depends on what value one places on ones data. It’s not until you suffer data loss that you can truly grasp what I’ve just said. In my case, I have hundreds of gigabytes of just family photos ranging from very old slides that have been digitised to weddings to our children as they grow up. In addition to that, I’ve also got family videos, a ton of documents and a lot of source code for apps that I’ve written in the past.

My backup requirements are simple but come at a cost:

• Needs to survive single disk failure
• Needs to survive whole machine failure
• Needs to survive environmental failure (fire, flood, etc…)
• Needs to survive theft

To achieve this I have 2 local FreeNAS servers that are configured with 4 x 3TB HDDs in RAIDZ (ZFS). This addresses my first 2 requirements. For my remaining requirements, I have a QNAP TS-210 at a remote site hooked up to a ADSL2+ router. I perfom a remote sync weekly.

At this point, I should also mention that a common mistake a lot of new comers make is thinking that using RAID is the same concept as backing up. So for the sake of simplicity RAID != Backup.

This is a pic of my old setup, i need to update it to reflect the new equipment mentioned above.

[Film Street]

That's a great set up.

[nogi]

Thanks. One thing I forgot to mention is that if you do a selective backup, don't forget to also backup your LightRoom database. Otherwise, even though you may have your images backed up, you would have lost your edits.

[arthurking83]

......

I've seen a few cases of digital bye bye. One lady I observed went through it twice. I think she went back to film after that.

.......

.....


And of course, she had her negatives scanned in triplicate and saved to more than just the one shoe box in the wardrobe that went to St Vinnies.

Or worst still! .. her ex has taken them, and may be claiming the images as their own!

At least at St V's, they've gone to a good home.

Yep, triplicate here too .. two external HDD's and one internal for now ... NAS(proper NAS that is, not the pseudo mock media player I recently purchased! ) is still yet to materialise in my office.


nagi ... how do you find the performance(s) of the QNAP's over the LAN?
The 419Pro is (one of) my preferred NAS products at the moment.