Ducks and backups
by Mark ~ January 24th, 2008. Filed under: Equipment notes, News & Tips, organization, software, technostress.
The ol’ saying of making sure your ducks are in a row couldn’t ring truer when it comes to backing up your computer. As I wrote about in my previous post, my PC decided it wasn’t going to boot on me a few weeks back. After messing around and not getting anywhere, I ultimately restored a disk image from the prior month and got it back in working order. But since my backup was a month old, a few other things saved my butt in losing a month’s worth of database information in Lightroom, website updates, etc. You may want to give these strategies some consideration to give yourself a little piece of mind. Of course the best practice is to not let a backup get a month old, but hey – nobody’s perfect.
For one, my primary hard drive is partitioned into 3 separate drives (C drive, E, F) The first partition contains Windows XP and my program files and settings. The other drives are for data. So when my computer crashed, and I had to restore a backup – I only had to restore the C: drive partition. Since it was a Windows blue screen issue and not my data being corrupted, my data files were all still up to date. Whew! Dodged a bullet on that one. How do you partition a hard drive? Well, there are lots of ways, but I prefer the simplest one in letting software like Partition Magic do it. It makes it rather easy.
Also, my Lightroom database and “My Documents” folder are both stored on the “E” drive. My images are mostly on external drives or Network drives – except for some unedited raw files that are on a separate internal drive that was safe from the crash. I guess the basic philosophy is to keep your data away from the operating system and programs, whether it is different partitions, external drives, networks, etc. I didn’t follow my own rule with my email however, and lost the months worth.
I have also praised the disk imaging program Acronis TrueImage in the past. It made the process very painless when I upgraded my main hard drive to a larger one, and it also made recovery from this last crash pretty easy as well. Acronis can create a “boot CD” for you – so if your hard drive completely goes wacko, or Windows, you can boot to the CD and it provides all the tools you need to restore one of your backups from another drive. I did learn it is a bit more complicated to restore from a Network drive than say a USB attached drive, so my backups have been moved to a USB drive now.
For my images, I tend to be a bit more religious about the backups. And even though they are already on a RAID5 network drive, they get backed up to another RAID5 network drive. I use Microsoft’s SyncToy to make sure those are ‘in-sync.’ It’s a great little free program that can be configured in a variety of ways, like only backing up new stuff, etc. So why not use SyncToy for everything instead of worrying about this ‘disk image’ (cloning) deal? Well, I think system boot drives are an entirely different animal than just data files. Even if I replace the old drive with a brand new one, it is nice knowing the new one should boot up with no issues.
I plan on using the same strategies when I get my Mac, but may have to look into other programs. If anyone has any recommendations for a good Mac disk image backup program, please let me know.
January 25th, 2008 at
Excellent. I’m glad that you were able to restore everything back and have little loss. I see that you take great measures to make backups. Unfortunately, I don’t. I make periodic complete copies of the Lightroom DB as well as my images, but not of the boot drive; however, that is always on my mind.
I’ll have to look into Acronis. It seems to have mixed reviews on Amazon. Some people love it, a few hate it. Nothing unusual, though.
Thanks for the info.
January 25th, 2008 at
Hey Paul – I suppose I like it because it is very easy to use, and you don’t need to be a tech-head to work with it. I previously had DriveImage, which was a bit more difficult. I haven’t read the Amazon reviews yet, but I suppose they are irrelevant to me because I have it and like it.
The system drive backup is especially important as your PC grows older and more ‘bloated.’
January 25th, 2008 at
I will have to take a look at something different for me I am terrible at preparing for the unthinkable.
January 25th, 2008 at
Cool picture. Sorry about your recent troubles. Technology is an amazing tool, but also the source of great frustration for many.
February 3rd, 2008 at
Mark,
You’re Mac will most likely come with OSX 10.5, which has the new time machine feature. Essentially, with a “backup hard drive” attached, it does regular backups of any changes you make to the system so you can roll back to a previous image of your OS. It is one of the reasons I have been thinking of upgrading (along with the multiple desktops that I miss from my unix days…it only took 10 years to make it to the Mac!).
I would also check out ChronoSync, it’s the best $30 I have spent yet on my Mac. You can use chrono sync to synchronize/backup directories. I use it on my laptop to backup all my data directories to my NAS array every time I connect to my home network. And, since I work on photo processing in the field on my laptop, when I get back to the home office, I use it to synchronize my photo project from the laptop to the directory structure I use on my NAS. It also works great when I do additional work on the laptop and need to push just the changes to the NAS for long term storage.
(This reminds me I have been meaning to do a write up about my work flow for a while…keep your eye on my blog as I’ll do this soon!).
February 3rd, 2008 at
Thanks for the tips Greg. Chronosync looks like a program I use for Windows called SyncToy. Unfortunately, SyncToy is a freebee that I have gotten really used to. Regardless, $30 is a small price for a good backup tool. I will definitely put that on my list of Mac software I need to check out.