Back up your good stuff

[Photobiologist]

Just a friendly reminder to back up your good stuff.

We had a power surge come through yesterday morning, and "lost" 2 surge supressors, a television, a DVD player, a DSL modem, and my main photography/mapping CPU. I think I might have 3 days worth of images on the hard drive that weren't backed up elsewhere that I will have to recover from the hard drive. Relatively little data was lost, even if I can't recover those 3 days worth of shots.

[Photobiologist]

Good news - the only thing in my CPU that was fried by the power surge (caused by either the tree falling on the line or the crew fixing the downed line), was the power unit. $150 later, and I am back up and fully operational...

[rpk717]

Robert, so glad to hear you're back up with minimal out of pocket expense.

Good lesson we should all listen too.

[jwuori]

Have Robert or Robert ever considered one of the companies that somehow backs up your stuff somewhere in cyberspace and say it will never be lost. I heard it advertised and it sounded like something you could do quickly as you finish editing?? We have a back-up hard drive but it was fried last summer in a storm. So now we have stuff on CDs and keep them at our daughter's house ( however, her house could have a problem and then where are we?)

[rpk717]

Have Robert or Robert ever considered one of the companies that somehow backs up your stuff somewhere in cyberspace and say it will never be lost. I heard it advertised and it sounded like something you could do quickly as you finish editing?? We have a back-up hard drive but it was fried last summer in a storm. So now we have stuff on CDs and keep them at our daughter's house ( however, her house could have a problem and then where are we?)

I know about those services but never considered using them. There are several reasons but mostly it's the download speed from your computer to the storage site. It will be very slow compared to your download from the compact disk to your computer, for Don and you think in terms of hours not minutes. Also the amount of images you and Don save would take a lot of gigs of storage, I don't think that would be cheap either.

I'm sticking with my on-site dual external hard drives that stored every image on two different hard drives. It's not connected to my computer or power supply 99.9 % of the time so I think it's fairly safe from losing both hard drives at the same time. I expect to lose one or the other at some point in the future but not both. Then I'll just pull the bad drive, pop in another and make another copy of the entire file on the new drive. I actually have 4 drives, 2 sets of two that I use for different types of shots. All 4 drives go into one box, so there is only one USB cord for all four drives.

[Photobiologist]

I've looked at a couple of the on-line storage sites, but MAN it would take DAYS to back up just the "good" full resolution files to those...

I'm like the other Robert, I have a bunch of hard drives that I switch out. They normally aren't connected to power, so it would have to be something catastrophic to destroy them. I've got to get better at sending one set to Kristin's office or our safe deposit box though...