How well are you backed up?
This is something that’s gnawing at me, so I figured, well, why suffer alone?
Digital photography has taken the world by storm. I now have several thousand images of Ryan’s first year of life (not to mention lots of other, lesser family events and milestones). I’ll bet you have a bunch of important digital images, too.
Take my handy Backup Questionnaire:
1. Do you back up?
- Yes, but infrequently. If I lost my main storage, a great deal of recent work would be lost.
- Yes, and frequently enough that if I lost my main storage, only a minimal amount of work would be lost.
- Backup? What’s that?
2. How stable is your backup?
- I back up to CDs or DVDs. The backup will last as long as their shelf life.
- I back up to an external hard drive, which stays switched off except when I am making a backup, to minimize the chances that it will be accidentally corrupted.
- I back up to a hard drive in a separate computer, but the hard drive is always or often accessible, so if that machine goes haywire, the backup may be lost.
- I back up to a second drive in my main computer. Whatever calamity befalls my main data may befall my backup, too.
3. What if you deleted or corrupted a bunch of your files and then, unwittingly, ran a backup?
- The previous backup would be overwritten with the new, corrupt, data. This would mean that the corrupt data would be gone forever.
- I keep a fixed number of backups, so as long as I noticed the problem in time, I could recover.
- I do incremental backups so I can restore to any one of many points in the past. I have a large window in which I could detect the problem and be able to recover.
4. What if your house burned down?
- All my backups are in my house. They would all be lost.
- I keep my backups offsite. They would survive.
My answers are middling: I have 1b, 2b and c, 3a, 4a.
My main problem is that I have too much data to back up to CDs, and DVDs have a poor shelf life. I really need to invest in an additional external drive and store it offsite, swapping it with the one at home periodically.
Take a moment and think about your own backup strategy!
Samson wrote:
Simply upload all your favorite photos using IBackup for Windows. Then access your photos from anywhere using an Internet connection. It’s that simple.
IBackup is like an extra hard drive right on your computer and it allows you to store your important documents and files securely online. It also protects you from data loss caused by system crash, drive failures, virus attack and theft.
You can allow IBackup’s application IBackup for Windows to backup your personal collection of photos by just selecting them and then asking the application to back them up. Or you can schedule daily or weekly backups of your photos to be on the safer side. IBackup’s browser-based application ‘Web-Manager’ can automatically sense the presence of these images and display thumbnails of backed up images in a ‘Media Gallery’.
In the Media Gallery you can shuffle between images and also watch a slide show of the images stored in a particular folder. You will find this useful for presentation of your business documents/images. You can even share an entire folder containing images with friends and family by creating sharable links and emailing them top others.
Posted on 14-Nov-06 at 4:56 am | Permalink
rich wrote:
Mozy.com
Free online backup - 2GB. For anyone you get to sign up for a free account and refer your email to them, they give you 1GB of space. (2GB+1GB).So if you use it please use my email Rich@247-cs.com as the referer. Thanks
Posted on 27-Dec-06 at 4:55 pm | Permalink