Digital Photography - Near Disaster - Backups - Page 18

As I continue along in digital photography, I am subjected to new situations on a regular basis. I have tried to setup my computer systems so that I would be ready if a hardware failure occurs. This account is proof of the importance of backups. My computer hardware includes two internal hard drives and two external hard drives. The first internal hard drive holds my operating system, program files and a My Documents folder which has many things in it but no photos. Everynight, Drive Image 7 (now Norton Ghost) runs and backs up the entire contents of the first drive to a second drive. The backup is in a file type that can only be read by the Drive Image program but it is easy enough to repopulate a new drive with an exact replica of the original drive or to retrieve separate files or directories.

Drive Image 7 can daily, weekly or manually at your convenience. I find that a scheduled backup makes it less likely that I will be without a backup when I need it. I try to check the backup drive on a regular basis to be sure that the program continues to run nightly. This is important because if you do not check, there could be a fault in the program and it may stop running daily and you will not know it. Drive Image has been bought out by Symantech and this program is now marketed as Norton Ghost.

I have two 250 megabyte LaCie external hard drives. I purchased this brand because of their stellar reputation. The primary external drive holds all of my digital images. My original plan was to have two drives and use the second as a backup for the first. I did that. I use a program called Karen's Replicator to compare the two drives each night and add any new or changed files from the first disk to the second disk. These files are not in any proprietary format. They are in the same format found on the original drive. I found another program that I like better. One of the downfalls of Karen's Replicator is that it would run fine every day. If there was a problem with the comparison, I wouldn't know it unless I checked the program's log file. After it had run without any problems for months, I didn't check as often. If I had, I would have seen a problem coming as there were errors in the log. I searched the web and found Synchromagic Pro. It will do everything that Karen's Replicator will and more. The feature that I like is that you can have an e-mail sent to yourself if there is an error in the synchronization. You can send an e-mail to yourself even if there are no problems with the synch. In the beginning, I have set up the program to send me an e-mail everytime it runs. Once I feel comfortable enough that the e-mails work well, I will change the program so that it only sends an e-mail when there is a problem. Another nice feature of the program is that you can schedule sych tasks or backup tasks on the Internet. My host company allows me to make a backup of my web site in a compressed .tar file online through the hosting control panel. I do this every Monday. I have programed Sychromagic Pro so that every Tuesday night, it connects to the Internet and downloads my backup to my hard drive. The program is not expensive and the peace-of-mind that it brings is invaluable.

I also use a great image database program named IMatch. I use IMatch to categorize the digital images, to caption them and to keyword them. I love the program and the more that I use it, the more I realize how advantageous it is for a digital photographer. My database information for IMatch is stored on my first internal drive and that data is backed up every night to my second internal drive.

The Day That Disaster Happened

I sat down to work on my computer and I brought up my directory list to navigate to a USB 2.0 jump drive that I use to go from work to home. I noticed that my first external drive was not in the list. I looked at the drive and saw that it had power. It appeared to be operating normally. I tried refreshing the screen and even rebooting the computer but no luck. I checked in the Device Manager in Control Panel and found it listed but it had no data. I checked the Disk Management section of the Control Panel and it was not listed. I was devastated, especially since the drive was barely six months old. It held more than 100 gigabytes of photos. After trying everything that I could think of to get the drive going, I did the last thing that a guy does, asked the manufacturer for help. The replied in a timely fashion and told me that if I lost any data on the drive, that I could try some software programs for retrieving lost data or send it out to have the data retrieved. I looked at my second external drive and knew that I still had it all. I did end up losing one folder of photos that were three years old. I believe that when the first drive started to go bad, bad files were transferred during the nightly backup and they could not be recovered. Fortunately for me, these were raw files and I had already converted them to tiffs and I have the tiff file in another section of the drive.

One of my mistakes is that I hadn't checked the backup program log in a few weeks and sure enough, the problem had been coming and I just didn't see it. Well, now that I knew that my loss would be minimal, I immediately became paranoid. Okay, I have the data on the second external drive, but what happens if that drive goes bad right now? Yikes!

I had enough space on my second internal hard drive to take a copy of all the files from the good external drive. I copied them over and scheduled a daily backup from the external drive to the internal drive. As I write this, I have just received a return authorization for my damaged external drive but the paranoia is still there. I purchased a 250 megabyte internal serial ATA drive and installed it yesterday. It is now the primary photo drive, Early each night the contents of that file are copied to the first external hard drive and then in the wee hours of morning the same process occurrs between the external hard drive and a different internal hard drive. I now have my files on three drives.

I have purchased a program named Archive Creator that is excellent for backing up to multiple DVD's. It creates thumbnails of the images on the drive and puts them in an html file on each disk of the backup archive to make the images easier to find. These DVD's will go in our home safe which is fireproof.

My last obstacle was to deal with IMatch and the new drive. IMatch was used only on the first external hard drive that died. Thank goodness that is a great program. I installed the new internal serial ATA drive and named it the G: drive, just like the old one. I told IMatch that the new G: drive really holds all the same photos as the old G: drive and sure enough, IMatch recognized them and applied its database to all the files. I did not lose a caption or a keyword.

What might have been a real disaster was averted due to some preplanning. If you don't back up yet, do it right away. Tomorrow may be the day that you tell the same story. I hope that yours ends like mine.