Peace of mind…continued

Not happy with the thought of having my priceless photos and documents backed up to a single external drive, I signed up for an off-site backup account with Mozy.com today.

After hearing Francis Ford Coppola’s horror story about thieves stealing his computer AND the backup drives attached to it, causing him to lose a lifetime of work, I decided that a measly $55/year was cheap for peace of mind.

So I installed Mozy’s proprietary software, marked the folders for backing up and clicked the start button.  My mac has been chugging along for hours now, sending data to my new, unlimited capacity storage site.One thing to remember when backing up your system, only back up the files that are truly irreplaceable. This means you don’t need to copy your computer system files, applications or any other data that can EASILY be recovered or reinstalled. Still, I’m looking at a backup of over 65GIGS!!!

Yeah, I save a lot of photos and videos. It’s a sickness. 

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Try gold for some piece of mind

Having just discovered that several of my older cd-r disks filled with photos have become unreadable in five short years, I’m making a switch to a different brand of recordable DVD disks. Made by Delkin, these disks have a gold core and are guaranteed to last 300 years. While I’m not gullible enough to buy into that claim, I have done a bit of research and found that these particular disks are living up to their claims…so far. 

Backing up to some sort of optical media has become a must-do routine for anyone shooting digital images. The ones and zeroes that make up our photos are fragile things that need to be kept on some sort of reliable storage medium. I personally back up all my shoots first to my external hard drive (that means I’ve got a copy on my internal drive too), then to optical when I have enough images to fill a 4.7 GB DVD.

The finished DVD will then go to an off-site storage facility. I use a large deposit box at the bank. The reasoning is that what’s the point of backing up if you’re gonna store it beside the computer? Fires happen and I’ve read too many sob stories about folks who didn’t store their copies in another location.

In the very near future I’m also planning to subscribe to either Carbonite or Mozy for a fourth link in my backup chain, but more on that later. For now, I’m happy to add gold as a link in the chain. 

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