Ripon City Photographic Society: You are only as good as your last Backup

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You're only as good as your last Backup - Backup Tips and the Chance to Win a Hard Drive

By gtvone on From the Forums

Want to win a Hard Drive for Backing Up your Images? Read on to find out How.

Ever lost something that you loved? I have, I lost a necklace that my very first girlfriend gave me - I was fourteen at the time I think, All I remember is that she used to cry during "Listen to your heart by Roxette" I know, that's touching… Anyway, I lost the necklace that she'd given me for my birthday. I realize that I couldn't "Back that up" but I still remember how it made me feel…

Things that you can backup include your digital photos and the rest of the contents of your computer… These days drive space is cheap and easy to set up, but unless you follow some golden rules there is almost no point.

G-Drive Q

Erin from Fabrik dropped me an email with her ten points to a good backup for you all to try, I'll post them below.

Win a G-Drive Q 1TB

That isn't the only thing that Erin came up with, Oh No!..G-Technology have kindly donated one of their G-Drive Q 1TB external drives to us as a prize for this weeks DPS ASSIGNMENT. The topic for this week is going to be "Drive" You can translate that any way you would like, but to catch my eye you're going to need to be creative and trying your very hardest!

Here are Erin's ten tips to a decent backup…

1. Reliability - Select a storage solution that has a good reputation, and is built to last. For example, to ensure reliability, all G-Tech drives come in an all-aluminum enclosure (no plastic), which acts as a heat sink, keeping the drive cool. Heat kills drives.

2. Capacity – Select a drive with enough capacity so you have room to grow. Rule of thumb is to by 2x to 3x the amount of space you'll need.

3. Connectivity – Future proof your investment. There are many solutions on the market, such as the G-Drive Q 1TB that come with USB 2.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and eSATA interfaces so you can be sure to connect with any system today, as well as in the future.

4. Local Backup Software – Mac users prefer to use Time Machine (it's a beautiful app and is very simple). There is a plethora of PC backup software tools available – Arcsoft, EMC Retrospect and more. Any of them will do fine. The important thing is to just do it.

5. Online Backup – For added protection, in case of fire, theft, or other natural disaster, it's wise to keep a separate copy of your most important stuff offsite, and available online. Solutions such as Fabrik Ultimate Backup offer 2GB for free of online backup space. If you want to upgrade, it's only $4.95 per month for unlimited capacity.

6. Develop a Backup Schedule - Good backup software will require you to set an automatic backup schedule once – on a day or time that's convenient for you; daily, weekly or monthly. You just simply set it and forget it. Rule of thumb, backup weekly at a minimum, or as often as you save/store important work or irreplaceable files to your hard drive.

7. Back up Everything - Today you can easily back up all of your hard drive data. No need to spend time sorting through every file or folder. Again, invest in a storage solution that's twice the size of your internal hard drive, to give your system room to grow.

8. Rotate Backups – Even though they're secure, some people are not comfortable using an online backup service. If this is the case, give yourself added protection. Use two drives and rotate one offsite. You should always, always, always have two copies of your most important stuff…did I say "always"?

9. RAID it – Solutions like the G-Raid Mini (it will ship w/RAID 1 later this quarter) or G-Safe solution provide RAID 1, mirroring. Whatever gets written to the first drive is automatically copied, or "mirrored," to the second, so if anything should happen to either disk, your data is still there.

10. Don't procrastinate – Unfortunately, the need to back up data is often a lesson learned from a bitter experience. Don't let it happen to you.

Thanks Erin!

I work in IT and (All jokes about a missing necklace and a bad eighties pop song aside) have seen "Disaster" happen, The company I work for, due to documented budget cuts wouldn't replace a piece of hardware, and as a result we had a massive failure of one of our nine tb disk arrays and lost just over a million documents, now, you may only lose a couple of hundred photos, but if you'd had that backup in place you would have lost nothing and you wouldn't have that sad face on!

G-Drive Q : Rear