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!
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!
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