Backing up your personal and business data is something everyone should think about. If you don't believe me, sit back and think about what would happen right now if your computer's hard drive stopped working right now. How much data that is really important to you would be gone forever if it wasn't backed up and how would it affect your life?
In my case, it would be a disaster of epic proportions. All of my art and photographs that I created over the years would be gone forever. I couldn't make any prints of my best selling works. Lots of work that I do for clients would be gone and how do I explain that? Moreover, all my financial data would be gone forever, not to mention important spread sheets and letters. Just the thought of this makes me shiver.
So, with that in mind, I thought I would share with you some possible backup strategies and suggest some additional reading material and some quality backup software.
In today's blog, I will tell you about my personal strategies that are working pretty well.
Inside my computer are two hard drives (one for programs, the other for data), one CD player, and one CD/DVD burner. Outside the computer are a 200 GB Western Digital external hard drive connected by USB2; and an additional CD/DVD burner, also connected by USB2.
All the software that run my programs are on drive C:. I do not backup this drive as I have all the original program CD's. If this hard drive crashed, I would just install a new hard drive and reinstall all the software from scratch. Having done this a couple of times, I know there is a better way.
If you have a little extra cash lying about, you could get an external hard drive of the same size, attach it via USB2 to your computer, and make an exact replica of your C: drive using a program like Norton's Ghost. When done, you turn off the external drive, disconnect it from the system, and store it away in case of emergency. You should update this drive every so often since you will probably add some additional software from time-to-time.
The second drive inside my computer is used almost exclusively for storing data that I create, such as accounting and other business data, photographs, final artworks, art works in progress, my web site data, and much more. I make sure that all my programs point to this data drive when creating files.
Every morning, around 2:00 AM, all the data on this drive is automatically transferred over to the external Western Digital hard drive. I use a program called, "Retrospect" that came with the external hard drive when I bought it. I simply programmed the software to do a backup of the data hard drive every night. In actuality, Retrospect doesn't copy the same files over and over. Rather, it checks for new files and only copies them over to the external drive. Much faster that way.
While I use Retropect for this one function, I don't recommend going out and buying a copy of it as it is expensive and really meant for tape backups. I have tried it for other backups and found it wanting, at least for the way I do my backups.
As for my original photos and art works, I use some additional back up routines. As I create new works, I back them up on CD's, usually make two separate copies of the CD's. One stays here at the house, while the other copy is stored offsite in case of fire or burglary. I use only the highest quality CD's as some cheap CD's will break down in a few years and lose all the data that was on them. For these backups I use CD-R's.
For my RAW-based original photos, I back them up on DVD's, again using only the highest quality DVD-R, such as TDK DVD-R or Tayo Yuden DVD-R. Again, 2 copies are made. So, for my artwork and photos, I may have as many as four copies of the same picture, just to be on the safe side.
Before I purchased my external hard drives and got into digital photography, I used to make all my backups on CD-RW disks. I would buy a box of 5 CD-RW's then use them in rotation for my data backups. The CD-RW are erasable and rewritable, so something like this might work for you. Most CD burning software like Nero can help you do these backups.
I do most of my work on my home computer, but as I am on the road continuously for six months out of the year, I take my laptop along and use it quite heavily in the field. At a show, I usually record my sales in a database and do other types of data that I want to save. I also want to have much of this data put on my home machine so I can work on it there.
For that, I use a backup/synchronization software program called Syncback. As I have all my computers networked, I can do this quite easily and painlessly. Before I leave the house, I "sync up" the data between my main computer and my laptop so that both have the exact same, up-to-date data. When I get back, I do this again so that both machines again are in sync. It works very well for me.
In the next installment, I will talk about some of the software available to help you backup your data and suggest some additional reading materials on the web that will help you formulate your own backup strategy.
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