So time for my ritual task done after the New Year of backing everything up off my hard drives.. In the old days so, long as you kept your negatives and transparencies somewhere safe there was little chance of losing things totally unless you had some sort of natural disaster affect your house. But since we all went digital how vulnerable are we? Computer viruses, burglaries,corrupted drives, mistakenly wiping etc something all mean that all these still and video records could go overnight. So I back everyhing up onto cold drives. These are external hard drives that I copy everything on to. In my case we are looking at 33,000 photos including scans of all nags and trannies dating back to 1955 if you include all my late fathers railway photos and god knows how many hours of HD video plus scans of stuff out of magazines like drawings and photos for future projects. And all my MP3 music files so there is nearly 12TB of data in total as of this January, it takes days to back it all up. Also on there are also all the Excel files that list every picture and vido file. once done these HDDs are disconnected and put somewhere safe well away from my home office. Mine are kept outside in the loft space in the workshop, wrapped in bubble wrap and kept in a couple of locked old aluminium briefcases Fingers crossed I never need to use them Kev
Good advice Kev. Santa gave me a 1TB HD portable drive for Christmas and it's plenty enough for all my junk.
Not forgetting Obsolete storage as well. I was explaining 5 inch floppy disks to my granddaughter the other day and she thought I was making it up. I went through the list of other relics for her loading video games off a cassete tape cassete tapes themselves 8 tracks Betamax tape players VHS tape players, VHS tapes, Compact VHS camcorders 8mm camcorders 12" video discs Compact flash cards Home burnt DVDs. try them a few years later and pray they still work I then explained why my Vynil record collection still works, still sounds better than CDs and becomes more valuable every day and why I'm still buying it today. Analogue rules Kev
Hi all Just trying to keep you all reminded to back up your hard drive files. My new year resolution is to invest in some extra HDD drives. These memory hungry little beasts need a lot of care and planning So looking at the Excel Image spreadsheets for digital photos and Camcorder HD files taken in 2023 the numbers are staggering. Same number of images as Raw files. See below 43.3 Gb of space taken up with JPEGs. 5185 images in total 192GB of High Def clips, 985 in total So the usual plan. Back-up them all onto cold storage drives, kept dormant and isloated in case the worst case scenario happens to the drives connected to the main PC and the House I.T network What I have started to do is move all the RAW format photo files onto a completely separate Hard Drive. If the JPEG folders go 'Tits' I can always recover the images off the RAWs The weather in the Lake District over Christmas, has been pretty rotten but today, on New Years Day we had a brief window where the sun came out, the rain stopped and the wind dropped. I got some quizical looks from the Askam Signaller when I turned up at the station at lunchtime and photograhed a fairly, Hum-drum, passenger Diesel Railcar. 156 417 looks pretty much like all the rest except that the last time I photographed it was in Gainsborough in Lincolnshire in 1992 Taken on either Fuji Reala or Velvia 35mm Colour transparency. Looking careworn in the old Regional Railways livery, The scan needs some work on the blemishes in the sky. But all the original Black and White and Color negatives and Kodachromes and Fuji transparencies are safe and can always be revisited Tidied up and given the current Northern Rail livery after transfer from the Midlands to the Cumbrian Coast As I finish typing this my P.C is churning away, copying my Japanese Image files from the P2 drive onto the Y Drive. This could take some time! Time for a beer and watch some College Football ( And dare I hope, in the NFL, the Cleveland Browns. in some way, Do It?) Kev
To add to the frustration of watching a computer whirring away to itself I decided to plug each of the Cold drives in turn into the laptop to check if they needed de-fragging. Some didn't but the first HD files one I connected did. Cue a green bar slowly going across the dialogue box as the processor chugs away. This could also take some time! Kev
So, Bored watching 'green process bars' going across the screen I decided to pop the side panel off the P.C to see how much muck was in the power supply, fans and Motherboar/Processor cooling fins. Filthy! I normally blitz it about every six months. Unplug everything and take the tower out to workshop and blast every nook and cranny with the workshop compressor and the blower nozzle. it is scary how much dust and fluff come out. Both the tower fan and the Corsair power supply seem to suck everything in the room in Kev
Hay Kev! Got a couple of Dell's sitting on the floor; when I decide to blow them out the resultant dust/hair/crap pile just rolls out. I found that if I put them up on a brick/2x10 or the like, not as much stuff in them. Guess the brick/2x10 are dust magnets? Not! I do know that dog hair stays on the floor once it clumps together, but I digress. Later
Oh No! Uncle Kev, once again, urging you to back up your precious digital files. just in case I picked up a Western Digital 10Tb HDD a couple of weeks ago from the local Pawn brokers. Gave it a deep scan with Nero 12 to ensure there were no nasties and set it to work backing up all the Image and Video files . I've changed the way I sort things out. I've separated the Raw Files out from the JPGs into two distinct folders stored away from each other and I'm still doing back up folders each time an SD card or a CF flash card gets filled up. These are your original source material and one day you might really need them! just saying I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the transfer speeds between HDDs and need to look into finding a way of speeding things up. Found a HDD stacker and cloner that doesn't need to be connected to a PC, Sounds great, but the more I looked at it, On Alibaba and made in China, maybe not so sure I'd trust it. Gonna spend my money on a new, bigger, Ultrasonic cleaning bath instead Kev
Always great advice Kev! I recently got a new 5TB drive and made a copy of my current back up drive. The new drive will become the primary back up going forward. My current primary back up becomes the cold storage. It will get pulled once couple of months or so and anything new to the primary will get copied to it. My old cold storage will get that treatment once a year. If you have ever lost files, you totally understand the why.
