Backups

I forget what started the conversation, but my mother told me once that if there was a fire in the house the only things she would want us to save if we could save anything, besides other people of course, were the photographs. "Everything else can be replaced," she said.

Times have changed a bit, and the biggest threat to digital pictures is a hard drive failure. To mitigate this risk, I used to burn all my photos and data to CDs. A few years ago, however, it started filling multiple CDs, and became a huge pain in the ass. The biggest issue was that I'd always forget to burn the CDs in the first place.

To overcome my forgetfulness or laziness, take your pick, all of my important data is copied nightly from my desktop to an old Pentium II computer running Linux. It only has 128 megs of RAM, but more importantly it has 1 Terabyte hard drive. I've used this process for three or four years and it is simply the best thing ever. If I or Mrs. FLG accidentally delete a file we can easily recover last night's copy. However, since the both computers are sitting right next to each other, a fire could still destroy all of our data, including wedding photos and soon baby pictures.

To solve this problem I archived, compressed, and encrypted all the photos by year. I paid for some off-site data storage space to which I am going to upload them. The first transfer will be time consuming, but after that a script that I wrote will only upload any photos that have been saved during the previous month. I'm a belt and suspenders kinda guy when it comes to my computer.