I bought two of these from Jordi before. Works great to back up your PC and laptop hard drives...something you should do BEFORE the PC or lap top hard drive crashes. As well, I keep one in my camera bag to back up my photo's on. http://www.bbcboards.net/zerothread?id=784574
"If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there'd be a shortage of fishing poles."
In my career, I never gave much attention to backups. I used to hear/read all kinds of horror stories of failing drives, thefts and all kinds of stuff and it never really put a scare into me. Once my desktop HD would fill up, I would dump onto another removable drive.
Over the years I accumulated a whole bunch of drives ... maybe 12 of them ranging from 250G to 750G. Last year, I went out and bought 2X 3TB drives and decided that it was time to "consolidate" everything into 1 or 2 drives. I spent weeks transferring old jobs over to new drives and when done, I'd format the "old" drive so that I knew it was done.
Well ... what I was never "scared" about finally happened. I was finishing up the last of the"old" drives and was getting ready to make a mirror of the "new" drive when I walked past my desk and accidentally kicked the desk, knocking the "new" drive and sending it to the floor. I picked it up, tried to get it to boot and nothing. Next day I sent it to a data recovery place to see if they could fix it for me ... because the drive was running, the stylus punctured all the HD waffers ... the drive was dead and nothing could be done with it.
Now ... imagine 8-9 years of assignments ... pictures of my kids being born ... photos of realatives who have passed ... all GONE.
It took me nearly 5 months (just finished last week) but, I recovered 90% of the data from the formatted drives. 750K photos over 8-9 years ... all had to be manually sorted, renamed and categorized. Biggest pain in the ass.
Sorry for the long rant ... If it helps someone then it was worth writing.
BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP ... there's no such thing as too much redundancy. I now have 2X 3TB at home with all my work ... as well as 2X 3TB mirrored hidden at my folks house. Always keep a set of backups OFFSITE.
That makes me sick just reading about it
One of my best friends is an ameture photographer and he uses backblaze just for this reason. The only problem with that is you can't really "retrieve" a single photo for use. It is strictly a backup system.
Yep, backups are important. Since i work in IT im super anal about backups, its just engrained in me. Personally i never depend on just one backup. I backup my mac to time capsule, which does incrementals hourly. I also backup my pictures and other indespensible data to an external raid 5 array that i leave at my sisters house(im a firm beleiver in offsite storage) and take home once a month to run my monthly backups on.
I am also thinking about leveraging the smugvault feature on my smugmug account. They allow unlimited storage of jpeg files and they encourage usign it to backup all photo's. the smugvault will let you also backup non jpeg and video for 12 cents a month per gig. I dont shoot RAW much so between that and my other data i might use 10 gig maybe a little more so it wont cost me much.
Does anyone else use Carbonite? It's an online backup storage site, I think it's $55 a year. We 've been using it for a couple of years so far, haven't needed it, thank God. My boss told me about it, said his hard drive crashed a couple years ago, but he was able to download everything back from Carbonite, didn't lose anything. Took him a looong time to download, but it worked. I'm just wondering if anyone else has any experience with them....
I've had it happen to me twice.....I back up everything important onto an external drive and to my private website only accessible through ftp. I was younger when I lost everything, so I didn't have anything terribly important I couldn't live without. Now that I'm grown and have pics and files that actually mean something, I'd die if they were lost forever.
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