A friend of mine just recently suffered the inevitable fate of all computer users. He lost all the data on his hard drive because of a drive failure. He lost all his documents, all of his mp3's, and all of his locally stored email. Worst of all, he lost all of his digital photos.
One thing I want to point out and stress is that all hard drives will fail at some point in the future. The purpose of this post is to remind you that you need to make sure and backup your data (especially those photos.)
Knowing that I was the resident computer guy, he gave me a frantic call this weekend asking for help. I was able to salvage some of his data using many of my various tricks, but there were some items that are gone forever. He had some backup files on CD that he made about a year ago but a large number of files since then are "poof" gone forever.
After making a quick trip to Best Buy we purchased a new hard drive and I got him to buy an external hard drive for backups. External hard drives are now incredibly cheap and there is no reason why you shouldn't be using one. Many of the newer models have "One Touch" buttons that will perform that backup on the fly or can be scheduled on a regular basis.
So if you don't have a backup solution, I recommend you get one ASAP.
Here is a link to what we just purchased, it works well and is plenty large enough to cover most computer systems.
He then asked what I do for my backups. I will not get into too much techno babble details, but the concepts for my solution will enable you to take your backup solution to the next level.
At my house I have 5 computers performing various tasks, one for my wife, one for my daughter, a desktop computer for me and a laptop for me. The fifth computer is a dedicated server running in my basement. Just like a typical office network all of the various documents and files are stored on this dedicated server. I'm a fan of the FreeBSD os for all of my servers. On this FreeBSD server I have Samba running which emulates a typical Windows file server. A series of Windows batch scripts on each windows computer runs a .bat file that backs up the various directories to the server on a nightly basis.
Sample backup-docs.bat file
xcopy "C:\Documents and Settings\manderson\Desktop" "Z:\backups\manderson\Desktop\" /D/Y/S/C
xcopy "C:\Documents and Settings\manderson\My Documents" "Z:\backups\manderson\My Documents\" /D/Y/S/C
This server is basically an old Dell GX100 running a Pentium 3 chip (circa 2000.) It has four 250GB hard drives that are mirrored so drive 1 & 2 backup each other and drive 3 & 4 backup each other (technically a RAID 1 configuration.) This gives me 500GB of usable space. I'm already currently using about 400GB of that disk space now to store all of my photos and files (each RAW file from my Canon 5D is about 13mb, so space gets eaten up rather quickly.) I have been shopping to upgrade this system to take me to a 1-2 terabyte RAID 5 solution and have gotten it down to about $1500.
Basically, this solution is very similar to the external hard drive solution I mentioned above, it just works for all of my computers on my home network. There are also network attached hard drives that you can buy that will perform a similar task for those of you that need to backup multiple computers.
The next step in my backup chain covers me incase of disaster. What if my house burns down, then both computers will be compromised and I still loose all my data?
Well I solved that problem by getting another GX110 and loaded it up with hard drives as well. I think it cost me about $500 in total.That server is located at my office and I perform a weekly rsync over the internet between the servers to copy over any of the files that have changed.
While my solution is more techie based, you can do the same thing with 2 external hard drives. One is kept locally attached to your computer. A second hard drive can be used to copy everything from external hard drive 1 to external hard drive 2 on a regular basis (that xcopy batch script above can be used for this task as well since it only copies changed files.) Keep that second hard drive in a safe place away from your home and you should be able to sleep well at night with good backups.
A team of astronomers using a telescope comprised of two Canon EF 200mm f/1.8L lenses has discovered a Jupiter-sized planet located 600 light years from Earth. The telescope, which looks like a pair of binoculars, consists of two 200-millimeter telephoto camera lenses. The lenses are attached to electronic devices that measured slight dips in light output from the star, indicating that an object was crossing in front of it. The telescope is on the summit of the Haleakala volcano in Hawaii. [ more ]
Canon has just posted a firmware update for the PowersShot SD430 Wireless Digital Elph, the company's first camera to offer Wi-Fi wireless communications capabilities. The compact, 5MP digital camera offers IEEE 802.11b wireless connectivity to Windows computers as well as to printers via an adapter or wireless LAN card.
The Digital Picture has just completed a review of the Canon EF 85mm f/1.2 L II USM lens.
The Canon PIXMA MP-800R Photo-All-in-One can do everything that other “multi purpose” photo devices can do plus it can also scan and print 35mm slides and film too. It’s a 1200dpi flatbed scanner, a one-page color copier and a high quality photo printer. You can make digital prints directly from flash memory cards, PictBridge-enabled digital cameras or from a computer. The only thing it doesn’t do is transmit and receive faxes. Equipped with Canon’s FINE printhead and 5-color individually replaceable ink tanks, it’s an economical photo inkjet printer with exceptional print quality. It’s also a very speedy all-purpose printer with both a top and bottom paper source. [