I thought I should wirte a quick post on the importance of backing up your files and photos from your computer. I’m writing this from an internet cafe, the hard drive from my computer has terminally failed for the second time in less that 12 months.
Hard disks are mechanical, all mechanical things will eventually fail, theres no question of that. Its just a matter of time. When will they fail? For the most part you can never tell, but they will, trust me.
Now, im not panicking about this, I am very careful about backing up my files so I know that I haven’t lost anything. My primary drive in my computer is backed up automatically every hour by Time Machine which is the program built into OSX 10 (leopard) on the mac. All my digital photos are stored on external drives and they are stored redundantly with identical copies on two seperate 1TB dives. As a further precaussion I also put select files on an internet storage facility to cover myself against something like a house fire that would take out all of my drives.
If you do not backup up your files you will lose them eventually. It might be next week or it might be in 10 years but give it time and it will happen. It`s not all doom and glom though, with the price of hard disk space falling through the floor now though there is no excuse not to backup your files. 1TB drives are available for $100 and 1TB holds a lot of photos. With the invention of storage robots such as the Drobo there is just no excuse. It couldnt be simplar to make your files redundant these days. Raid systems from companies such as LaCie take care of everything for you and the Drobo system is even upgradeable so you can just keep adding more and more storage to it as required. My current external drives are nearly full and I will be testing out the drobo system soon i think.
If you are reading this and thinking ` oooh I have been meaning to backup up my files for a long time` I urge you to stop reading right now and do just that. One day you will kick yourself if you don`t.
I`m taking this opportunity to upgrade my computer system too but when i`m fully back online in a couple of days time expect an update about my trip to Vancouver last week to shoot with Poorboyz productions.
Happy new year!!
