A Bunch of Saturday Links

This past week I came across a number of interesting links. I didn’t have time to post then, but now that it is the weekend and I have a bit of time, here they are:

  • John Paul Caponegro has been posting frequent updates about a photographic expedition to Antarctica at the John Paul Caponigro Blog.
  • Speaking of Antarctica, the Boston Globe has published a stunning series of photographs from Antarctica, made by a variety of photographers all over the continent.
  • Over at his blog Jim M Goldstein has reported on his hard drive disaster and his successful efforts to recover. He also shares some interesting and useful ideas about backup strategies.
  • Yosemite photographer – and author of a highly regarded book on photographing in Yosemite – has started a blog: Michael Frye Photography Blog. He has a lot of good information to share about photographing the Valley, and he has already published useful information about photographing the iconic Horsetail Fall in the next month or so.
  • Andy Frazer has offered another in his ongoing series of commentaries on night photographers, this time with words about and links to Aaron Hobson.

All good stuff!

2 thoughts on “A Bunch of Saturday Links”

  1. Dan, it was interesting reading Jim Goldstein’s blog about his hard drive failure as I had recently had some similar problems myself. I had a double simultaneous loss of data on my main drive on my computer and my backup 500 GB NAS drive. I built my own PC about 5 years ago (I know, I need a new one, $$$), and I built it with removable drawers for the hard drives. Initially I put Windows 2000 on one drive and over the years I had saved a lot of work there, both from hiking pictures to my more serious attempts at trying to do photography. Last year I realized I should back that stuff up and so I bought a Buffalo 500 GB NAS and copied all my files to it. And I also installed VIsta on another removeable drive and started doing most of my work there. At the same time I was living dangerously and I did not have any anti-virus programs on my PC and after discovering I had a virus, I bought one of the popular programs, which also included backup software in it. It cleaned out my virus on the VIsta drive OK and I decided to let it backup stuff to my NAS. So then I needed to get some files from Windows 2000 and tried to boot it up and had a disk read error. And I thought, no problem, I’ll just get them from the NAS, only I discover its been corrupted because the backup software apparently just backed up more and more versions of my files and I guess just overwrote everything on the drive with its massively growning binary images until without warning, it corrupted the drive. So now I was looking at complete loss of all that data from my Windows 2000 drive. Luckily, after months of trying, I finally recovered that Win 2000 drive after finding the original emergency floppies I made when I first installed the OS. So I reformatted the NAS drive and copied everything back onto it and then I went and bought a 2 TB Buffalo Linkstation Duo that I configured as raid 1 and I’ve got the stuff backed up again there. And I have decided to buy another portable drive as soon as I can that I will copy my files to and then lockup in my desk at work. Will that be good enough to protect my data? I don’t know but I don’t want to loose this stuff again!

    1. Wow. What a story.

      In the end, there probably is no such thing as a completely foolproof backup. When that giant asteroid hits your state, no backup is going to survive. So the goal, I think, is to reduce the chances that you’ll have a catastrophic failure from which recovery is not possible to the lowest possible level. My current strategy has at least three copies of everything, and I make the backups using three different backup applications, and one copy (the Copy of Last Resort) is stored off-site.

      Knocking on wood…

      Dan

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