The jury is (and may always be) out on the best solutions for digital file archiving and backup. What follows are some thoughts about same and some solutions I have been exposed to:
- This videoblog post by David Pogue for his weekly tech column in the New York Times arrived in my inbox and I started feeling like I should, probably sooner rather than later, think more about backing up my ever-growing archive of location photos and other data I use as part of my livelihood.
- This post on TechCrunch got me doing something about it in an online way.
TechCrunch
- The Reality Of PR: Smile, Dial, Name Drop, Pray. | Saturday, 4 July 2009, 8:34 pm
One thing I hated about being a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini back in the day - we got to work on really cool deals (the last deal I worked on be. […]
- Twitter + World Of Warcraft=Tweetcraft | Saturday, 4 July 2009, 7:00 pm
For all of you World of Warcraft fans out there, there’s a new Twitter client that is worth checking out. TweetCraft is an in-game Twitter client for. […]
- Amazon Applying For In-Book Advertisement Patent | Saturday, 4 July 2009, 4:33 pm
Before everyone gets in a huff, let’s consider Amazon’s intentions with these patent applications. Surely they would never allow advertisements to be. […]
- Update 3/5/2008 - Mashable - July 28, 2007 — 04:50 AM PDT — by Sean P. Aune
ONLINE STORAGE: 80+ File Hosting and Sharing Sites
“From sending one document to backing up an entire business, data storage is the key to everything nowadays. Due to popular demand, we’ve put together a list of more than 80 of the leading file hosting services, many of which are completely free.” (…read the rest…)
Mashable!
- Sarah Palin Shuns Press: Talks to Twitter, Facebook Instead | Saturday, 4 July 2009, 7:51 pm
Sarah Palin yesterday announced her plans to resign from the role of Governor of Alaska, leaving the press clueless as to why. Does she plan to retire. […]
- World Domination: The iPhone is #1 in Japan | Saturday, 4 July 2009, 4:40 pm
Since the release of the original iPhone in 2007, Apple’s smartphone has been on a steady climb upwards, taking huge chunks of the U.S. mobile phone. […]
- Obama: Does He Pass the Social Media Test? | Saturday, 4 July 2009, 2:59 pm
He used social media and the web unlike any other presidential candidate in history. Barack Obama’s incredible online presence turned into a grassro. […]
Here’s the scenario- as a location scout, I deal with A LOT of photos- individually they are not unusually large files, but between scouting jobs and photos that people send me of their property, I look at and have to deal with organizing a heapo’ pictures on just about a daily basis! Not only that, in the location scouting biz, information is money so there have to be ways to access this visual information quickly(as well as the contact info and notes about each- but more on that later…).
The first place any photos go when I aquire them is a remote 160 GB Firewire (or IEEE 1394) hard drive pretty much dedicated to archiving location photos, shortly after which, especially if the photos were made for an in-progress location scouting job, they get uploaded to my Locamundo account for immediate use in an online location album and archived for permanent reference.
Call me paranoid 
but what if:
my hard drive crashes?
locamundo crashes? (the photos get compressed on locamundo too and I have prefer to have “original photos”). Also I could lose my internet connection temporarily (its happenned more than once and could occur on the Locamundo end or my ISP’s end (network problems, severe weather/ power outage) in any case, its annoying and does nothing to help me help my client solve their problems, which we are more often than not trying to do on a tight deadline.
I have many of my files backed up locally on yet another local harddrive partition, but all these files on the same machine take up a lot of hardrive space. The cost is not such a problem in and of itself, harddrives get cheaper every day; however, all these files lying around in partitions on the same local harddrive(s) do nothing to help speed along more mundane tasks such as searching for files, whether they be related to location scouting scouting or not and really increase the time it takes for my anti-virus program to do its daily scan of my system. I defragment my hardrives regularly to help keep them speedy and healthy and lots of files make that go much slower as well.
Purchasing additional removable drives might be the way to go.
In “the real world”, the fact is, once my files are uploaded and keyworded on Locamundo, I may not ever need to touch them again, or if I do it is likely to be a long time before I do, but the fact remains that I cant just delete them.
Enter online storage solutions.
Right now I am trying out MediaMax Streamload. Streamload is the name of a Windows program ditributed by MediaMax which runs locally(on my computer) as a service and provides a secure network link to my private file storage account on MediaMax’s server. At this writing, MediaMax provides a free 25GB account, upgradable to provide more storage space. Then next upgrade level is 100GB for $4.95 per month, which is very affordable and which I might move up to as soon as I figure out why Streamload is hanging when I try to access the local folders where my files are located. I like the online solutions, they do backups on their end as well.
But…like I said, I gotta lotta files, it could be a matter of organizing them differently so the Streamload application doesnt cease to respond. Compared to local drives, an internet connection, from dialup all the way up to heavy-duty broadband connections are pretty lightweight. You can cram just so much info in a data pipe at time. It’s always something…
Update: After opening a free Media Max account and downloading and running the Streamload Beta, when I used it to find my files to upload, the program hung and had to be forced closed. Kinda defeated the purpose of using proprietary software whose stated purpose was to facilitate uploading large numbers of files simply and quickly. When I needed to do a restart my entire system hung. I rebooted to safe mode and to try and uninstall Streamload that way but its uninstaller would not work in safe mode. I had noticed that Streamload was running as a Windows Service so I disabled it there, rebooted normally and uninstalled Streamload. Summarily, it didnt seem to play well with my system, your mileage may vary.
Hmm, maybe there are some Bittorrent solutions out there? In addition to bittorrents typically taking a LONG time (this is my experience- again, your mileage may vary), they rely on a pool of people sharing a file to pass the pieces to each other and the Bittorrent app takes up recources while it is working- I dont wanna share my files with others and sometime I have to have a lot of programs open on my computer that I need to be running full steam- I sure dont need bog-downs and crashes trying to make a deadline! Still, gotta look into that a little more
CD’s/DVD’s you say? Been there, done that. Takes forever, ties up computer resources and the media (the cd’s/ dvd’s) data deteriorates over time. I have two crates of cd’s that I have used to back up files over the years and everytime I put one in the cd drive, if it is more than a year or two old, there is a good chance it is unreadable- corrupted. I have cd’s going on ten years old, I probably have a lot of files I may never again have access to. File recovery is VERY time consuming or VERY expensive. Remember Zip Disks and floppies? What a laugh!
IDE, Firewire and USB Harddrives have become very affordable so, as I mentioned above, this is a road I have followed as recently as the past year or so. Traditional IDE hardrives of very good quality can be bought very cheaply and the prices seem to continue to drop. Cases and USB/Firewire interfaces amke these drives removable and portable. These drives are fast. May be time to buy some new hardware.
I welcome feedback about all this so, for now, I am going to leave comments open for this post, something I rarely do, as I just dont have time (you see me trying to buy just a little time doing backups here don’cha?) to put into housecleaning blog spam. Akismet, do your thing! We’ll see how it goes…
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- 4/21/2008 update | added map / feeds / general cleanup | previous timestamp: March 5, 2008 at 8:13 pm
- Note: Post updated Sat March 5th, 2008.
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