The Value of Backing Up

A couple of years ago, while Little Guy Productions was located at it's Limaland Branch, the upstairs washing machine went haywire and caused a flood in the basement.

The same basement where all of our Hard Drives, camera equipment, computers, and Bobble Head Dolls were located.

Thankfully, the water stopped inches short of my old Macintosh G5 computer and all the fun little surge protectors that were lined up next to it.

Unfortunately, some of my mom's photos and reels of film were damaged in the flood, which sadly brings my "backup" mantra into the forefront of many conversations I have with my tech pals.

Today's technology is great; most cameras allow us to see photos seconds after they're taken and memory cards allow us to store over 1,500 images on a single disk. Photo albums seem to have become a thing of the past, replaced by the new tradition of passing cameras around the table to spark a "remember when" moment.

In short, those photos need to be backed up. They can't stay on that card forever.

Now you need to think about how to store them:

External Hard Drives
My favorite brand is LaCie. I've used countless other drives in the past (Mercury Drives, G-Drives, Nextor) but have and will continue to purchase LaCie. We've got a couple of options - LaCie Rugged drives are great for those on a budget, while their mega counterparts (Big Disk, Big Disk Extreme) offer you big bang for a hefty price tag. I've had the best success rate with LaCie, only having one Hard Drive crap out on me (it was a Rugged).

Outside Company
I also back up important files and some photos to an off site server, using Apple's Mobile Me program. For $100 a year, I can store 20 GB worth of information on their servers. It's not a ton of space, but it's almost fail proof. Another great company that offers consumer solutions to data backup is Carbonite. Carbonite has a flat yearly fee ($54.95) that covers unlimited data storage. If you have oodles of stuff to backup, that's not a bad deal at all.

Disks
You can always archive your stuff to CDs or DVDs, but they have a limited shelf life. If you're okay with re-burning all your Data every five years, this is probably the cheapest solution. Be mindful that cheapest, in this case, also means cheapest quality. CDs and DVDs do not take scratching, fingerprints, small breezes very well. If the CD/DVD is damaged so goes your information.

Be wary of companies that sell Gold Archiving Disks. They'll tell you that the CD/DVD is safe for archival purposes for 300 years. Here's my beef with that line of logic from a shifty salesman:

300 years?

DVD technology has only been around for 10-15 years, tops. The way technology evolves, I can't imagine they'll last as long as their predecessors (Beta, VHS). That would mean, even if by the remote chance that they do last 300 years, you're going to need to "WILL" your future families a computer that can handle reading them. Good luck with that.