History
When I decided to go digital with my photography, I knew that I would need to have some good way of archiving and backing up my data so that I would be assured of not losing any data if something bad were to happen to my computer. Well, the other day, I got a first-hand glimpse at what it’s like to have to completely rely on my backup system.
Trauma
I went to boot up my computer, and instead of being greeted by my friendly welcome screen, I was greated with a blank gray screen. I’m technically savvy enough, so I tried a couple of things, but to no avail. After a chat with tech support, it was clear that I needed to wipe my hard drive and reinstall Mac OS X.
A happy ending
Luckily, I do have a backup system in place and luckily, I run it regularly. It took some time, and I learned a few lessons, but after a few hours, I was back up and running with my data restored.
Lessons learned
I found that my backup system was not as perfect as I had thought. It took a lot more manual file copying than I would have liked. Now that I have my system back up and running, I’m going to add a little fire drill to my backup routine that will further assure me that no data will be lost in case this happens again.
My system
I use Retrospect to back up my hard drive to an external firewire hard drive. I also archive all events to DVD twice: once right after I download the images to my computer from my camera, and again after I’ve sorted and organized all of the event’s images.