Hella Solutions blog: "Document. Share. Inspire."

This morning I was reading an article on the Southern California fires and came across this bit:

The lucky ones will find their homes still standing amid a blackened landscape. Thousands of others are not so fortunate.

Robert Sanders returned to a smoldering mound that once was his rented house in the San Diego neighborhood of Rancho Bernardo.

Among the possessions the 56-year-old photographer lost were his transparencies, melted inside a fire-resistant box, and a photograph of his father.

“I’ve lost my history,” Sanders said. “All the work I’ve done for the past 30 years, it’s all destroyed.”

A not so gentle reminder to always back your work up. What you want to do is store your back-ups off site (meaning don’t keep them at the same location as the originals). This should go for any format you are working – film, audio, written…it can be a bit of a pain to do this but what hurts more is the above example – try restoring your work from nothing. But once you set a routine going it gets easier. The minimum schedule for people doing regular work should be a monthly back up. Be aware that not all storage mediums are equal. CD-Roms are more stable than DVD-Roms but yes they have much less capacity…to read more, WikiPedia has a pretty good break down on the subject.

Why not take this weekend to get yourself backed up…in the long run you will thank yourself.

p.s. one tangental point are those movies on DVD and music on CD you paid a lot of money for. under current law the greedy, shortsighted bastards at the RIAA and MPAA have made it “illegal” to back up your legally purchased media. basically, if you lose it you have to pay for it…again. great deal for those guys but the consumer gets screwed big time. totally bogus, i know. the easiest program i know of to deal with this on a PC is SlySoft’s AnyDVD and CloneDVD. AnyDVD is nice as it strips the copy protection off of both CDs and DVDs and allows you to then back up YOUR media using other burning programs like CloneDVD. CloneDVD is a good program for backing up DVD movies and works along side AnyDVD. For you Mac people’s, a popular program called Mac the Ripper seems to be best. So, what are you waiting for? You have two days to get backing up!

p.p.s. share your back-up success and horror stories using the “Comment” link directly under this text..

NoahC audio training, computers