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HDProman

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While I do realize this is not about photo retouching I am sure the members here will be my best source for information on this important topic.

I would suspect members will fall into one of two groups, those that are prepared for a major computer disaster and those who are thinking about preparing for a major computer disaster just as soon as they "get around to it". Well the time has come and passed for me to "get around to it".

Let me share a brief story about my coworker, Rob. Rob's wife is an avid film photographer who shoots several hundred pictures every month. She also loves to scrapbook all her pictures. Her collection represents twenty-five years of pictures and scrapbooks. She has "all" her scrapbooks, originals and negatives stored at their residence in Lake Arrowhead, CA. As you may know this mountain community recently suffered from a firestorm with the loss of three hundred plus homes and for a time threatened with complete destruction. Fortunately the fire spared Rob's home, however, the threat of fire still exist. Rob's wife now has a second chance and is making plans to protect her lifetime of work.

If all our important date is destroyed, can we expect a second chance? Yes, we can, but only if we have a proper backup plan.

Let me explain my backup plan thus far. I only have done limited research and do look forward to your input. I have searched this forum using "backup" and only discovered three recent threads. There is more on the PC Tools forum, I just fell better discussing this topic here.

My PC only has the OEM 60GB hard drive and so far any backups I have are on CD-R's. I can backup everything to CD's and remove the original HD and install a new large drive in its place. Next, I would reinstall everything on the new drive. Replace the original drive making it the secondary drive and use this secondary drive as my scratch disk and backup.
I look forward to your suggestions about drives, backup software and workflow.

I am looking at backup from a two-prong approach, protection from HD crash and protection from total destruction or theft of my entire system and on site CD's.

How have you provided for each situation

--
Newbie, having fun.
 
1. Backup everything with Ghost to another HD. This solves problems with crashes.

2. Backup all your data to two CD copies. Put one in the closet, for safe keeping and put one set at work/relatives house/commerical offsite storage site. This solves the theft and fire problem.
HDProman said:
While I do realize this is not about photo retouching I am sure the
members here will be my best source for information on this
important topic.
I would suspect members will fall into one of two groups, those
that are prepared for a major computer disaster and those who are
thinking about preparing for a major computer disaster just as soon
as they "get around to it". Well the time has come and passed for
me to "get around to it".
Let me share a brief story about my coworker, Rob. Rob's wife is an
avid film photographer who shoots several hundred pictures every
month. She also loves to scrapbook all her pictures. Her collection
represents twenty-five years of pictures and scrapbooks. She has
"all" her scrapbooks, originals and negatives stored at their
residence in Lake Arrowhead, CA. As you may know this mountain
community recently suffered from a firestorm with the loss of three
hundred plus homes and for a time threatened with complete
destruction. Fortunately the fire spared Rob's home, however, the
threat of fire still exist. Rob's wife now has a second chance and
is making plans to protect her lifetime of work.
If all our important date is destroyed, can we expect a second
chance? Yes, we can, but only if we have a proper backup plan.
Let me explain my backup plan thus far. I only have done limited
research and do look forward to your input. I have searched this
forum using "backup" and only discovered three recent threads.
There is more on the PC Tools forum, I just fell better discussing
this topic here.
My PC only has the OEM 60GB hard drive and so far any backups I
have are on CD-R's. I can backup everything to CD's and remove the
original HD and install a new large drive in its place. Next, I
would reinstall everything on the new drive. Replace the original
drive making it the secondary drive and use this secondary drive as
my scratch disk and backup.
I look forward to your suggestions about drives, backup software
and workflow.
I am looking at backup from a two-prong approach, protection from
HD crash and protection from total destruction or theft of my
entire system and on site CD's.

How have you provided for each situation

--
Newbie, having fun.
Click to expand...
 
MagicAngel said:
1. Backup everything with Ghost to another HD. This solves
problems with crashes.

2. Backup all your data to two CD copies. Put one in the closet,
for safe keeping and put one set at work/relatives house/commerical
offsite storage site. This solves the theft and fire problem.
Click to expand...
Thanks, as I am new at this, what is Ghost, a link would be useful and I will follow up.
--
Newbie, having fun.
 
As soon as my (now two or three year old) new computer arrived, I had my husband install a second HD. This new drive was partitioned for saving my documents, photos, etc.. and for a large scratch disk partition so the original HD could be used just for the Windows OS. The computer is not connected to the internet. I back up all my documents, photos, etc. to high quality CDs (Fuji & Kodak) on a regular basis. One set goes to our son's for safekeeping and the other set is stored here. I plan to back up the CDs to DVDs as soon as practical.

Cassandra
HDProman said:
While I do realize this is not about photo retouching I am sure the
members here will be my best source for information on this
important topic.
I would suspect members will fall into one of two groups, those
that are prepared for a major computer disaster and those who are
thinking about preparing for a major computer disaster just as soon
as they "get around to it". Well the time has come and passed for
me to "get around to it".
Let me share a brief story about my coworker, Rob. Rob's wife is an
avid film photographer who shoots several hundred pictures every
month. She also loves to scrapbook all her pictures. Her collection
represents twenty-five years of pictures and scrapbooks. She has
"all" her scrapbooks, originals and negatives stored at their
residence in Lake Arrowhead, CA. As you may know this mountain
community recently suffered from a firestorm with the loss of three
hundred plus homes and for a time threatened with complete
destruction. Fortunately the fire spared Rob's home, however, the
threat of fire still exist. Rob's wife now has a second chance and
is making plans to protect her lifetime of work.
If all our important date is destroyed, can we expect a second
chance? Yes, we can, but only if we have a proper backup plan.
Let me explain my backup plan thus far. I only have done limited
research and do look forward to your input. I have searched this
forum using "backup" and only discovered three recent threads.
There is more on the PC Tools forum, I just fell better discussing
this topic here.
My PC only has the OEM 60GB hard drive and so far any backups I
have are on CD-R's. I can backup everything to CD's and remove the
original HD and install a new large drive in its place. Next, I
would reinstall everything on the new drive. Replace the original
drive making it the secondary drive and use this secondary drive as
my scratch disk and backup.
I look forward to your suggestions about drives, backup software
and workflow.
I am looking at backup from a two-prong approach, protection from
HD crash and protection from total destruction or theft of my
entire system and on site CD's.

How have you provided for each situation

--
Newbie, having fun.
Click to expand...
--
http://www.pbase.com/cassandra
 
We back up all our hard drives using Ghost on a regular basis. I just did mine yesterday. We also back up our files with photos and projects separately since they are on a different drive.

We were evacuated during the California Cedar fire in October. One of the things I felt was necessary to take was my CPU. My husband didn't take his but I took his back up disks plus mine. The first thing we did was unload the safe, pack the car, unplug my computer and put the cats and their carrier and litterbox in the car and wait for the police to tell us we had to leave.

When we got home and unpacked we were shocked at what we didn't take. But, I had our computer records on CD. Now our next project is to scan and make backup copies of all of our important documents and store them in a safe place other than our home.

It takes a big scare like a devistating fire to wake some of us up. Over 2800 Californians lost their homes and many only had time to get to their cars and get out. They lost everything. Many lost their lives.
 
Original HD is used for Windows OS and program files (Word, Excel, Photoshop, etc.)

Cassandra
Cassandra said:
Cassandra
HDProman said:
While I do realize this is not about photo retouching I am sure the
members here will be my best source for information on this
important topic.
I would suspect members will fall into one of two groups, those
that are prepared for a major computer disaster and those who are
thinking about preparing for a major computer disaster just as soon
as they "get around to it". Well the time has come and passed for
me to "get around to it".
Let me share a brief story about my coworker, Rob. Rob's wife is an
avid film photographer who shoots several hundred pictures every
month. She also loves to scrapbook all her pictures. Her collection
represents twenty-five years of pictures and scrapbooks. She has
"all" her scrapbooks, originals and negatives stored at their
residence in Lake Arrowhead, CA. As you may know this mountain
community recently suffered from a firestorm with the loss of three
hundred plus homes and for a time threatened with complete
destruction. Fortunately the fire spared Rob's home, however, the
threat of fire still exist. Rob's wife now has a second chance and
is making plans to protect her lifetime of work.
If all our important date is destroyed, can we expect a second
chance? Yes, we can, but only if we have a proper backup plan.
Let me explain my backup plan thus far. I only have done limited
research and do look forward to your input. I have searched this
forum using "backup" and only discovered three recent threads.
There is more on the PC Tools forum, I just fell better discussing
this topic here.
My PC only has the OEM 60GB hard drive and so far any backups I
have are on CD-R's. I can backup everything to CD's and remove the
original HD and install a new large drive in its place. Next, I
would reinstall everything on the new drive. Replace the original
drive making it the secondary drive and use this secondary drive as
my scratch disk and backup.
I look forward to your suggestions about drives, backup software
and workflow.
I am looking at backup from a two-prong approach, protection from
HD crash and protection from total destruction or theft of my
entire system and on site CD's.

How have you provided for each situation

--
Newbie, having fun.
Click to expand...
--
http://www.pbase.com/cassandra
Click to expand...
--
http://www.pbase.com/cassandra
 
It is Norton Ghost. You can find it everywhere.
HDProman said:
MagicAngel said:
1. Backup everything with Ghost to another HD. This solves
problems with crashes.

2. Backup all your data to two CD copies. Put one in the closet,
for safe keeping and put one set at work/relatives house/commerical
offsite storage site. This solves the theft and fire problem.
Click to expand...
Thanks, as I am new at this, what is Ghost, a link would be useful
and I will follow up.
--
Newbie, having fun.
Click to expand...
 
Is this case disaster recovery is relatively simple as images can easily be copied and don't require complicated setup's etc... to be accessible again.

Protecting against disaster simply means spread betting. A second local HD protects against the other one crashing, but won't protect against a thief taking the whole machine. A CD copy will, but could suffer from UV wear. So make two. (DVD is similar). But if the house burns, the CD will also. So store at two locations (the greater the distance between the two the better) and every 5 years reburn (DVD might be more cost effective here) at least one of the two sets.

Norton Ghost is a disk imager and isn't really needed here, in fact it isn't even a backup tool. It is commonly used in corporate environment to produce an image that allows to roll-out a particular installation to machine really easy. Using it as a backup tool might be tempting, but as such it is inefficient, but it is very good in what it does. The software to burn to removable storage is all that is needed when you want to protect against loss of the images.

If you want to protect the machine being off-line (i.e. broken) for a longer period of time then the strategy will change. If fact you can do both.... but keep a good focus on the disasters you want to guard for, the biggest trap is to think you've protected yourself against danger only to discover that it is the wrong danger.

HtH Chris.
HDProman said:
While I do realize this is not about photo retouching I am sure the
members here will be my best source for information on this
important topic.
I would suspect members will fall into one of two groups, those
that are prepared for a major computer disaster and those who are
thinking about preparing for a major computer disaster just as soon
as they "get around to it". Well the time has come and passed for
me to "get around to it".
Let me share a brief story about my coworker, Rob. Rob's wife is an
avid film photographer who shoots several hundred pictures every
month. She also loves to scrapbook all her pictures. Her collection
represents twenty-five years of pictures and scrapbooks. She has
"all" her scrapbooks, originals and negatives stored at their
residence in Lake Arrowhead, CA. As you may know this mountain
community recently suffered from a firestorm with the loss of three
hundred plus homes and for a time threatened with complete
destruction. Fortunately the fire spared Rob's home, however, the
threat of fire still exist. Rob's wife now has a second chance and
is making plans to protect her lifetime of work.
If all our important date is destroyed, can we expect a second
chance? Yes, we can, but only if we have a proper backup plan.
Let me explain my backup plan thus far. I only have done limited
research and do look forward to your input. I have searched this
forum using "backup" and only discovered three recent threads.
There is more on the PC Tools forum, I just fell better discussing
this topic here.
My PC only has the OEM 60GB hard drive and so far any backups I
have are on CD-R's. I can backup everything to CD's and remove the
original HD and install a new large drive in its place. Next, I
would reinstall everything on the new drive. Replace the original
drive making it the secondary drive and use this secondary drive as
my scratch disk and backup.
I look forward to your suggestions about drives, backup software
and workflow.
I am looking at backup from a two-prong approach, protection from
HD crash and protection from total destruction or theft of my
entire system and on site CD's.

How have you provided for each situation

--
Newbie, having fun.
Click to expand...
 
That is a great article for peole who have been living under a rock for a few year. (which seems to be more people than I would think).

I wouldn't worry too much about the format. Older formats will likely be supported for a long time. When the CD is no longer useful, people can always convert their image over to the latest and greatest when they transfer the CDs over to the new format.
Kent C said:
... from PCMag might be of interest...

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1404042,00.asp

--
Kent
http://www.pbase.com/kentc
Click to expand...
 
Here is how I back up my system. First I have 2 hard drives - both 80 gb each. I use a free backup program called Cobian Backup that does incremental backups as well you can schedule it to do backups at certain times. It can be found here:

http://www2.educ.umu.se/~cobian/prog.htm

Each night I use Cobian backup to backup the files that I think are important from my C drive to my D Drive. This is my 1st level of backup.

My second level of backup is that I back all the files I think are important to CDs. Again I use Cobian backup. Just one word of caution make sure that the files are smaller than the CD as the program does not recognize when the CD is full. This may be fixed in the latest version, however, really does not present much of a problem - you just have to plan a little. These CDs can then be stored offsite.

I also have a backup manual where I document everything that I have on my system (eg where is the original pgm (CD), where I downloaded it from, installation parameters etc)

And last but not least make sure that you have an antiviris program and a firewall.
--
Bert D
http://www.pbase.com/robgiraffe/art
 
MagicAngel said:
That is a great article for peole who have been living under a rock
for a few year. (which seems to be more people than I would think).
Click to expand...
Another "honest" comment. lol

I have no idea of the level of knowledge of some people asking questions here and the data in the article isn't so dated that it isn't useful.
MagicAngel said:
I wouldn't worry too much about the format. Older formats will
likely be supported for a long time. When the CD is no longer
useful, people can always convert their image over to the latest
and greatest when they transfer the CDs over to the new format.
Click to expand...
Pretty much what the article says.
--
Kent
http://www.pbase.com/kentc
 
Kent C said:
Another "honest" comment. lol
I have no idea of the level of knowledge of some people asking
questions here and the data in the article isn't so dated that it
isn't useful.
Click to expand...
I thought it was a great article! It really spelled out a number of answers to thesort of 'You should already know this' kind of questions. However, with that said, people who are into digital photography really should ask those questions first, before "what camera should I buy?"
Kent C said:
Kent C said:
I wouldn't worry too much about the format. Older formats will
likely be supported for a long time. When the CD is no longer
useful, people can always convert their image over to the latest
and greatest when they transfer the CDs over to the new format.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Kent C said:
Pretty much what the article says.
Click to expand...
Yep.
 
My system works this way:

1. I backup my hard drive twice a month with Norton Ghost to a backup drive on my system. (Creating ghost files, not a clone).

2. I backup all of my data (photos, documents, website...) to either CD or DVD about once a month. I create two CDs/DVDs of all of the data and keep them in different locations.

I don't like incremental backups, I've given up on those, but for those who like that kind of stuff, I'd suggest GoBack. I keeps a live incremental back of the system that can be restored to any point (within reason). I will undo all or some of the changes to any point in time (normally a bootup).

In other words, you boot your system, install a driver and it crashes something, you reboot and press a button and the drive install is gone. Works great.

In combo with Ghost, it makes a good way to backup a system giving increment and full backups.

For those you don't know how Ghost works, let me plug it. When you Ghost a drive it take a picture of the drive. The last time I lost a hard drive on my game computer I went to the store and purchased a new drive. I stuck it into my machine and fired off ghost. In 45 minutes my computer was restored back to exactly what it looked like 1 week before. I didin't have to format the drive or anything. Plus the new drive was 20 gig larger than the old drive. (Size doesn't matter to Ghost, just you can't go down to a smaller drive than you have data).
giraffe said:
Here is how I back up my system. First I have 2 hard drives - both
80 gb each. I use a free backup program called Cobian Backup that
does incremental backups as well you can schedule it to do backups
at certain times. It can be found here:

http://www2.educ.umu.se/~cobian/prog.htm

Each night I use Cobian backup to backup the files that I think are
important from my C drive to my D Drive. This is my 1st level of
backup.

My second level of backup is that I back all the files I think are
important to CDs. Again I use Cobian backup. Just one word of
caution make sure that the files are smaller than the CD as the
program does not recognize when the CD is full. This may be fixed
in the latest version, however, really does not present much of a
problem - you just have to plan a little. These CDs can then be
stored offsite.

I also have a backup manual where I document everything that I have
on my system (eg where is the original pgm (CD), where I downloaded
it from, installation parameters etc)

And last but not least make sure that you have an antiviris program
and a firewall.
--
Bert D
http://www.pbase.com/robgiraffe/art
Click to expand...
 
Wow, I can’t believe what happen! While attempting to install a new harddrive my system crashed, before I started my “new” backup plan. I recovered all my important date from damaged harddrive, however the motherboard was toast. My Dell system was not practical to rebuild and now I have a complete new system.

As soon as I am up and running my first project will be backing up, I hope you all have good backup plans and can survive a major problem as I have just experienced.
Best of luck and Happy Holidays, Floyd.

--
Newbie, having fun.
 
I've lost two hard drives this year, total failures. (On different computers). I've had one install go bad and trash the system and I've lost a set of very important files (guess they were deleted).

In each case, I was able to restore everything with a minimal amount of work thanks to my backup plans.
HDProman said:
Wow, I can’t believe what happen! While attempting to install a new
harddrive my system crashed, before I started my “new” backup plan.
I recovered all my important date from damaged harddrive, however
the motherboard was toast. My Dell system was not practical to
rebuild and now I have a complete new system.
As soon as I am up and running my first project will be backing up,
I hope you all have good backup plans and can survive a major
problem as I have just experienced.
Best of luck and Happy Holidays, Floyd.

--
Newbie, having fun.
Click to expand...
 
HDProman said:
I look forward to your suggestions about drives, backup software
and workflow.
I am looking at backup from a two-prong approach, protection from
HD crash and protection from total destruction or theft of my
entire system and on site CD's.
Click to expand...
For a total protection from HD crash you may want to consider RTMirror ( http://www.fsoft.it/rtmirror ): it's a new program that copies new and modified files, in real time, to another HD or another networked computer as soos as they are saved.

Used together with a good backup plan it can really reduce to zero your chances of a data loss.

There is a thread about it at http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1004&message=6686870

--
Fulvio Senore
 
I backup my hard files using DriveImage and then copy the image to a removable hard drive on a networked computer. I also copy the image to DVDs which I keep in a firesafe. This allows me to resore a complete system, in the event of a disaster. I take these backups on a regular basis.

I also backup all my data files (photos/memos/e-mails etc) on a weelky basis to a pool of DVD-RWs which I again store in a fire safe.

Having worked in the IT sector for thirty years, I've seen the traumas caused by not implementing a DR procedure :(
 
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