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"#sunset #blue #sky #clouds #red #orange #cloudgasm #cloudporn #trees "

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YOU NEED TO BACK UP YOUR STUFF!

Not exactly about photography directly, but certainly something related to photography and everyone that uses a compter. YOU NEED TO BACK UP YOUR STUFF! No matter what it is, you need to make sure you have several copies of it. It’s something easily passed off, put on the back burner and forgotten until something happens. And then the panic sets in when something happens. It’s one of those typical sayings, “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.” Something will happen, it will, there is only a matter of time. You just really hope that when it does, you are prepared for it and can deal with it easily. 

I can’t reiterate how easy it is to put off making back ups. It is time consuming, it really is. Especially if you have to deal with discs. It takes a lot of time to plan how you are going to back up gigabytes of information on to a stack of disc. Then it takes a lot of time to actually get the information onto those discs. It always seems to become a, “I’ll get to eventually,” issues. There is always something else that needs to be done. I get it, I’ve done the same thing, and I’ve lost information. I’ve been fortunate though. What I lost wasn’t that critical and it was long before I was taking this many photographs. But, I did almost lose the small amount of images I had at the time because the incorrect hard drive was formatted. Fortunately, it was only music I lost, as bad as that still was, at least that’s all that it was. The images were safe at that time. 

What is prompting this writing is what I am having to take care of at a company I work with. Last week, their server crashed. That’s bad, but servers are built with the possibility of a crash in mind. Usually there is some sort of redundancy built in so all information located on them is duplicated and if one drive fails, you simply replace it while the other(s) are still working fine. It shouldn’t be that catastrophic unless we are taking fire or direct lighting strike damage. This one just failed. So, the IT company that set it up, picks it up to get the new one setup. When they get into it, they discover main drive failed. This shouldn’t be a problem, check the secondary drive. Well, that drive was worse than the main one. So now there is the proverbial Strike Two! As terrible as this is, they have a tape back up system in the server. I don’t know much about them, but at one time, I think they were used a lot. Now, I believe, internal and external hard drives are what is primarily used. The tapes are checked and, if you didn’t guess it then you shouldn’t be playing, the tapes have no information on them. Even though it appeared the tapes were backing up, they really weren’t.

Here I am going through hundreds of emails and numerous old CDs. Trying to pull information from anywhere it can even possibly imagined. We are talking about a almost 100% loss of information going back to the late 1990s. Did you get that? That’s getting close to 15 years of information. Around 30,000 hours of work, GONE!

Yes, they were backing up the information. But, the other part of creating back ups is: Testing. Those copies were probably never tested to make sure they were actually working. So, even though you’ve done all the work of backing up, you need to set aside more time and make sure those back ups actually contain the information that is supposed to be on them. It’s really useless to go through the trouble of backing up anything if you are’t also going to make sure that it is working like it should. 

You need to decide what it is that you need to back up. There are the obvious things like photos and documents. But, there is so much more. Have you ever thought about backing up your bookmarks? If you use multiple browsers, do you back up all of them? Many application have custom setting that can take weeks for you to get just right. Do you think to include those during a back up? For those photographers out there: If you use Lightroom, do you back up your catalogue or setting? If you shoot Raw, yes much of the information is stored in the sidecar files, but the catalogue includes information as well. And your presets, export setting, keywords, etc. are stored in another folder. If you are a gamer, do you back up your saved games and game setting?  Movies, music, home videos and I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. There are so many little things that, if it is important to you, you need to be aware of when deciding what to include.

So, what do you use to back up the information? The good thing is there are several options. I personally use external hard drives that I keep in a fire proof safe. I run back up whenever I make major changes to my system or files. Storage is cheap now. I recently came across a receipt, while cleaning out some old boxes, from where I purchased a 250GB hard drive in 2005 for $200. Now you can get a 3TB drive for $150. Of course, an option that has been around for some time are disc. You have CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray. Consider the amount that you want to back up because their capacity is 700MB, 4.7GB and 25GB, respectively, with only a single layer. Another wonderful option is online back up. I, at one time, used Carbonite and was very pleased with it. I just quit using it since sometimes it would take days to complete the upload because I could be uploading 7+GB. And with a service like this you really need to have a very fast upload speed from your ISP. But if you can deal with the length of time or aren’t uploading that much at once, this is a great option.

There are several applications that you can use to help make this process easier if you are using external hard drives. If you are backing up your entire system, Mac has Time Machine included with the OS. With it you can go back in ‘time’ in your back ups to restore as much or little as needed. The System Restore in Windows is similar, but doesn’t copy to an external drive, but I think I’ve seen the newer Windows OS includes a back up application. If you only want to copy certain folders, you can use something like SyncTwoFolders (Mac) or Allway Sync (Windows) or any number of others that you can find. These allow you to select individual or groups of folders as a source and a target where they will be copied. These will scan the source for changes and duplicate those to the target. 

I think I have gone on about this enough. You should know by now that YOU NEED TO BACK UP YOUR STUFF! Just do a little research and you should find out plenty of information about how to deal with exactly what it is that will fit your needs. BACK UP YOUR STUFF NOW!