June 15, 2005

Backing Up

I've always took seriously the importance of backing up. But I am surprised how much I have gotten away with keeping only one copy of important files on my main storage drive. Well, in recent weeks, I've gone and have a back up drive to the back up drive and now, I'll be burning dvds as a tertiary backup. Automatic software to make this task of backing up will also be put into place and to make the routine a routine.

The dvd burner is new to me. I just got the drive today and have all ready burned over 25 gigabytes of image files. I don't see this trend changing any either because of the larger and larger image files. Also, the fact that my workflow has changed dramatically adds to the process of having larger files. It is a good thing that burners, media and hard drives have come down in price.

I don't ever want to have a major catastrophy of loosing my own important files, which I have done on a smaller scale, but even more so, client files. Believe me when I say I am knocking on wood.

2 comments:

Randy said...

I remember reading somewhere that after 9/11, a large number of businesses failed and never came back simply because of lost date. No backups, no way to recover lost files. Out of business. Makes you think.

I'm working on web site changes and hired someone to help with menu coding. Gave them access to my server and they accidentally wrote over "live" files rendering my active web site useless. Luckily, I had a backup copy of all my web files and was able to quickly solve the problem.

Backing up is paramount to survival and long-term success. What software will you use to automate your backup procedure?

Erio said...

I'll be using Retrospect, which I was able to see at a friend's place where data is just as important to him as these files are to me. It looked no nonsense and simple to use. I can manually back up or schedule them automatically.

Yesterday, I ended up burning over 35 gigs of data on both CD and DVD. It is still hard for me to dump files off my main drive as I lost image files on bad CDs. I couldn't retrieve photos from them. Fortunetely I burned 2 copies and was able to retrieve the files off the secondary backup. Makes me think I need to burn everything twice, but where do we draw the line...

 
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