Its not uncommon for many companies to backup their data and nowadays it is the norm to do that especially since there are always many risks that can occur to wipe out all of your important data. Normally in larger type systems, having a backup and then having a DR (disaster recovery) backup of that backup seems to be a way to ensure that important data is never lost.
At the meantime, I don’t have the budget of what most larger companies have hence I just went ahead with my own backup strategy. Previously I had always procastinated on getting extra external hard disks as I was always wonder what size I would get. Yesterday I took the bullet and bought two external 500Gb hard disks.
As you can see above, its the Western Digital Mybook Essential Edition. Both of these hard drives will be identical in terms of data meaning that one will store my photos and the other one will be a backup. Unfortunately I haven’t devised a true DR backup strategy yet where I should have another backup somewhere at least 100km away from the original.
Previously I used Acronis True Image to backup my work but at the moment I wanted the files to be available even from the backup side so I decided to try this software called Allway Sync which allows me to synchronize both my drives with a click of a button. Best of all, it is free 🙂
Getting these two additional external hard disks allows me to free up more space on my desktop as well as use my other external hard disk to be a backup for my personal laptop.
Other than that, I decided to beef up my desktop at home with more RAM.
Yup that is two sticks of 2Gb of DDR2 RAM for my desktop. Yes I also do know that my 32-bit Vista machine can only take in 3.5Gb but its cheaper to just get two sticks of 2Gb RAM. Cheaper than that I paid for my MacBook Pro.
And finally, I managed to sell of my older MB-D200 to fund for a MB-D10. In case you were wondering what these are, they are actually battery grips which fits to the bottom of my two cameras, the Nikon D200 and the Nikon D300 respectively. And yes, the D200 and D300 are actually cameras and not some secret government code which is meant to be kept a secret (mind the pun as I just watched the Bourne Identity recently).
With this I have actually switched my shooting strategy, which is to have the D200 use the wide angle lens I bought the other day and the D300 to use either the 50mm f/1.4 or the 85mm f/1.8 lens.
Ah-hah, that explains why you're flat broke 🙂
Anyways, backup is like insurance — you rather not use it but when you need it, you will appreciate it. I did when a disk crash in 2002 wiped out a lot of photos but the backup was sweet! During that era, I had chemical coated plastic sheets to capture photos and not compact flash cards…they were called transparency slides 😛
Yeah at least now I feel so much safer with at least two extra copies. I need to slowly remove the ones on my desktop soon as I am fast running out of space.
Transparency slides? Man, that is like old tech man! 😛