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A Dreadful Warning
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Just a warning to all you people out there who don’t have their photos back up, disaster can indeed happen to you.
To cut a long and frustrating mornings worth of story short I was trying to download the weekends photos and having major problems with I/O errors and then the data disc turned up its toes and died.
But about four months ago I had bought an external hard drive, really cheap now 500gb for ?120, and had them backed up, Yes Yes Yes.So after thinking it would never happen to me it did, but backups saved the day.
Although I would think that all the people on here are so sensible that they have striped arrays all over the place just in case someone is still swithering about backing up do it now
Bought a 400Gb external myself a while back..just have to discipline myself to back up to it more often. Mind you..the last few weeks haven’t had anything worth backing up on to it… :D
But wise advice anyway Neelly.
A sobering story!
An external HD is THE most essential accessory for any digital photographer.
I would guess its shocking the amount of people out there who do not back up their photos!Robbie,
you don’t necessarily need disipline. You just need scheduled tasks
Most Windows pc’s have NTBackup on them that can perform weekly backups.I just wrote a simple little back command that will automatically copy all my shots
on two seperate disk. One in the pc and one external.
With a simple double click it goes off and does the job.
If I forget to it manually it is scheduled to run once a week.People nowadays are forgetful souls s having it automated is a help.
Oh and before any other techies jump on me ( aidan ) you cannot always rely on
schedules and they should be checked regularly.Have fun
I’ll discuss that with ya tommorrow Graham..really do need to sort something like that. My back-up procedure is haphazard to say the least… :shock:
Jees, that reminds me, I’ll dig out that drive for you this evening.
I’ll have to dig out the software for it as well.Cool…cheers for that Graham. :D
Speaking of which.,.did you say you had an old Soundcard as well?
May as well be cheeky…never get anything being reticent… :lol:
I just wrote a simple little back command that will automatically copy all my shots
on two seperate disk. One in the pc and one external.Care to share??
Ok this is a little complicated to describe on a forum but what I use is XCOPY.
It’s a dos based command and is on a windows operating systems.
Basically I wrote up the commands in notepad and then saved it as XCOPY.BAT ( batch file )
You can then use Windows Scheduled tasks to automate this process.Here is a link to the XCOPY command, it can be a little tricky to get going but once you get it right
you are sorted. http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/xcopy.mspx?mfr=trueHere is a link the scheduled task application
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308569I’d have no problem dropping to your machine over the next few weeks and giving you hand setting it up.
NTBackup is easy enough to get up and running as a scheduled task. When you run it, it fires up a wizard and it’s easy enough to use. Just make sure you have your hard drive turned on and select to backup to file on the ext. hard drive.
I actually use 2 external drives which I swap in and out every now and then.
Hi Guys
About a year or so ago I had the unfortunate problem of my backup external hard drive packing up!! Just after my computer packed up!! BUT I always put all work onto CD / DVD as well. I spent days putting it all back onto the computer. Now I have a new computer and new external harddrive and DVDs, But should I backup my backup?? Two copies of every DVD? twin external harddrives? where would it end.
Phil
I can give you an example of why the planning of backups needsreal thought
I used to use a design company in the UK for set designs for exhibition stands. they backed up in two places both removable media.
We got a request to use an old design for a set for a client. they went back to their backups and found the backups failed, they were unable to get the info back from them.
so they thought they better check their backups and found that all 15 years of backups and archive were actually failures, IE they had no archive of work at all
luckily the sort of work they do archives are not that important as its quite rare to have to rework and old set.
the other thing is if you use external hard discs for backup and use them regularly then your actually running the drive as if its the one in your PC therefore its gonna fail in the same sort of ammount of time.
and when it comes down to it each archive or backup you do is not goiung to be that much data, you ar much better using some form of optical disc, a dual layer DVD-r for example holds around 8 Gigs of data, how many people need to backup more than that in a few days.
if you want to use hard discs, you really need a hardware based Raid 5 solution, so that if a disc fails you can put a new one in and the raid will rebuild itself.
Notice the word hardware, if you do it in software on your PC the first time your PC fails you will lose the whole raid and ALL the data on it
Has anyone got their hands on a blue ray drive yet?
Lacie do one for about 1,000.00 euros, the single layer discs hold 25gb and a dual layer disc holds 50 gb of info. the discs are about 25 euros each!
Not very often I need discs of that size but occassionally a job goes out on 3 or 4 dvds, think I will wait until the price drops a wee bit.
Personally I will stick to backups on both disc and harddrive, the hard drive for easy access and in the event of failure go to the correctly labelled box containing several hundred discs and dig out the one needed!!
Folks, CD’s and DVD’s that your burn only have a shelf life of around 3 years. Nothing can beat using a pair of hard disks that you swap in and out, unless you have a mad budget and want to go industrial. If one drive fails … no biggie, you replace it… your other one is fine.
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