Backing up your photos
2005-06-14 by Bob Cain
I am often reminded of how volatile data is, its really only a matter of time before our hard disk will die or we will accidentally delete something. So, what do you do to back up all those wonderful photos? Sure my gallery <http://robertcain.smugmug.com/photography> below has 5.5GBof photos but that's compared to 14GB on my computer because of file size limitations I can upload. Here is what I have setup on my computer: 4 (yes four) 200GB hard drives. 110.00 each. 1 promise RAID controller. 237.00 http://www.google.com/froogle?q=FastTrak+S150&btnG=Search+Froogle My RAID controller turns the individual drives into one huge 750GB (RIAID LEVEL 5) drive. So if a drive fails, I still have my data thanks to the RAID controller sharing data between them. Then I just have run the the store and swap the busted drive with the new one. Super geek explanation here on how RAID level 5 works: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html I also burn photos on DVD, this in case an electrical storm fries my computer, or if I remember that its a CD ROM not a Coffey holder. Lastly I have a huge amount uploaded to the Internet. Mainly I have www.ofoto.com <http://www.ofoto.com> (for storage) because photos there can be up to 20MB in size. Anyway I just wanted to inspire people to think about how they manage the inevitable. Data loss by implementing some type of recovery process. Of course not everyone is as geeked out as I, so I suggest to simply purchase an external Hard drive and then pluging it in and copy away. You can get one for 100 bucks: http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_attrib.php/page_id=11/popup2%5B%5D=2:394/sortby=priceA Oh yah and by the way, I still have to get a utility to "un-erase" potential mistakes. I would hate to accidentally delete something so I think I might install this: http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm -- Thanks, Bob Cain http://robertcain.smugmug.com/photography [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]