It's backing up files time

I got an email from a friend of Alexandra in Oslo and was told that Alex's laptop died and she wasn't going to be online for a while. That sucks and it happens to people all the time. But everyone thinks it will never happen to them.

It got me thinking that my computer is no longer cutting edge, and while I back up onto an external drive, I have used that 500GB WD MyBook Drive for about 18months now. So I thought I would do some backups of the backups. I damaged an external drive in December of 2006 and I lost thousands of pictures. It was a simple oops, but something that gave me such a sinking feeling that I don't want to ever repeat.

I might take measure to alleviate that happening again, but the plain truth is that all hard drives will fail sometime. Whether you trip over a cable and knock it over, drop the tower, or it just... dies. Computers do get stolen too.

So yesterday I went out and got a spindle of DVDs and started backing up. My first thought was to do it shoot by shoot, but that would have wasted a lot of space on the DVDs so I went month by month. Well. I knew it was going to take some time, but the last three months of 2006 and the first six of 2007 (where I am up to at this point) has taken 15 DVDs and an entire evening and part of this morning to burn. July 2007 is up next at 17GB. So that month will be roughly 4 DVDs. :)

Since I started to use the MyBook hard drive in December 2006, I have used 310 GB of the 500GB - nearly all of it photos. You know you shoot a lot when you stop counting individual images and go to GBs as a measure.

I will be at this for a bit still over the next few days. But the alternative would be devastating.

So, go out right now and buy some CDs and DVDs and make copies of you business plans, your MS Office files, your homework, your screengrabs, and so on. Oh and your pictures. :)

And do it frequently: such as when you have done enough to warrant filling up a CD or DVD. Not enought to fill about 50-60 of them. :)

Back up Back up Back up.

Mike

Mike Wood Photography