Do you backup your important files?
If you’ve ever had a hard drive failure you’ll know exactly why I’m writing about this topic. If you haven’t, know that you will, and I hope for your sake that you will be prepared for it. Hard drives die. It’s a simple truth, and not a matter of if, only when.
Backing up your stuff is a very personal thing. I probably go way overboard on this, but I’ve made a conscious decision that I don’t want to lose any of my important files, ever. Mostly that means my original images and other photography data, but it also includes all of my other important documents such as personal letters and financial and tax data. I even include the settings for some of my favorite and most important software iin this category. I have all kinds of presets and defaults for Lightroom in particular that would be just plain painful to figure out how to reset if the main drive on my computer were to fail, so I make sure to back that up too.
Backing up your stuff doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive. You don’t need to run out and buy a NAS box (network attached storage) to connect to your home network, and you definitely don’t need to shell out the cash for a Drobo (but that would be awesome!) or a hardware Raid system.
Backing up can be as simple as buying a second drive and manually copying your important stuff over every couple of weeks. This could be a second internal drive in your desktop machine, but these days it’s far easier to pick up an inexpensive external drive that you can connect via USB or Firewire.
Using a simple backup strategy like this will protect you from a single drive failure. Keep in mind that this will only protect the data that you have up to date on the backup drive, so if it’s been a couple of weeks since you did your most recent copy, you may still lose a lot of files. For me that would likely be hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of new photos. It’s also important to be aware that this will only be protection against a drive failure. It won’t protect you from a natural disaster such as a fire or a flood unless you store the backup drive somewhere other than in your house. It’s easy enough to keep it in your shed, your car, or over at a friend or relatives house, but doing so makes it that much more likely that your most recent backup will be from weeks ago instead of just days…
A much better strategy would be to buy two external drives. Keep one of them connected to your computer, and store the second one at an off-site location. Use software that will automatically copy your important files to the connected drive at regular frequencies, and swap out the two drives every couple of weeks.
Although my personal backup strategy is much more complicated than this (in order to ensure absolute redundancy), the basis for it is essentially this second alternative. I like to do a backup every night using a an automatic backup program called “AJC Directory Synchronizer“.
There are many other programs out there that would also do the trick, but this one works and it’s not very expensive. Windows users should also check out “Cobian Backup” (it’s free!). I’ve never used it but it gets great reviews.
Of course Mac users should check out “Time Machine” and “Super Dooper“. The combination of these two systems working together will make your life so much easier than anything available for Windows…
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