My computer crashed. I can't get any files off the dang thing. I don't really care so much, but we had pictures of the kids that we really liked, and it looks like they're gone.Ever hear anyone say something like that? Probably the smartest thing a security guy will ever tell you is "Back up your data." I just got done with several days worth of hoop jumping to get a bunch of pictures back. It went like this:
1. Take cool pix with digital camera.
2. Store pix on laptop.
3. iPhone grabs pix from Laptop (yay, iPhone!).
4. Laptop crashes. New computer doesn't have pix.
5. iPhone uses stupid proprietary Apple format (ithmb) that nothing else can read (boo, iPhone!).
Long story short, I found a way to convert .thmb files to .ppm (Photoshop) format, and then convert .ppm files to .jpg. Yay me! Now I have these back:
I'll edit the black edges out, but at least I have the pictures.So what does this have to do with you and Christmas? Well, I'm backing the pix up to one of these:
That's a 1 TB (that's Terabyte, as in 1000 Giga- bytes) Western Digital "My Book" Ethernet storage device. It's plenty big enough for all out pictures and music, and it plugged right into the home network. If you use WiFi (and who doesn't?), just plug it into a port on your WiFi router.
All the Windows computers see it, Ubuntu sees it, and once I configure the new MacBook, it'll see it, too.
Best Buy has equivalent products for $100. If you're looking for a present for someone, and are willing to drop a C-note (kind of limits the number of people, at least in my life), then you will be the guy who kept disaster from striking. Not a bad gift, that.
4 comments:
It is a lot better than nothing, but if it is really that important it should be on optical media (which get replaced every few years) too.
Jim
i'd also suggest a windows home server thing. HP and others make a little headless windows box that we use for this this and other backups.
it also has things to hook into media center, etc for picture sharing over tivos and all that.
the BEST feature is you can also configure it to back itself up to amazon's cloud. all of our pictures/videos end up on 3 systems this way: whatever first computer, copied to the media server (and also backed up in the media center's backup of said computer) and then the pictures/videos/music are all backed up to the cloud.
we're using like $3.27/month in google storage fees for like 30 gigs of pics+movies+music?
Jim, long-term persistent storage is important.
John, another advantage of your approach is that the storage is off-site. If your house burned down, you'd still have the pictures.
One copy of data is data you care nothing about. Two copies is one. Three copies, one of which is stored off-site, and I start to believe that the data matters to you.
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