Hopefully long term readers remember my articles on backing up to the cloud:

Backup to the cloud - Part One
Backup to the cloud - Part Two
Backup to the Cloud - Final Thoughts

Well I am sure that none of you care but I just thought I would mention that my image archive backup is now complete and safe in the web:


My Image archive was 300gb but I decided to got through it & cull a load of images I didn't want and would never use. I know some people keep everything but I really can't see the point in keeping out of focus shots, test shots, etc.

The cull got it down to 150mb and it has since grown back up to 285gb (sheesh those 5DmkII files are big). So it has take 163 days (I lost 10 due to being away) and has averaged 1.74GB a day. That means the system can cope with around 50GB a month of images, which is easily enough for my needs.

Think we can count that as a success and I can rest easy knowing my images are safe.

Labels: Backups, Cloud, Data Security, Equipment, Web, Workflow

Last week I had a great time in the Lake District. This year the weather played ball with plenty of sun and just a few showers to add some drama. This was a total contrast with our visit there last summer. when it rained and rained and rained some more.

We were based just off the A66 underneath the slopes of Great Mell Fell. Which gives great views across the area. On the Wednesday night I headed out with my camera towards Keswick. But I could soon see that there were two options available: carry on towards a Keswick that blanketed in cloud or divert towards a sunny Ullswater.


As I drove I was racked with indecision, even going around roundabouts a few times as I tried to decide where to go. In the end I decided to stick with my original choice of Derwent Water.
thick cloud was covering the lake but I rewarded for sticking with my guns by some rather wonderful lighting effects as the sun was defused by, cut through and bounced off the clouds.


In the words of the great Hannibal Smith - I love it when a plan comes together!

Labels: Cloud, Taking Pictures

I have had quite a lot of feedback about my articles on backing up to the cloud:
Backup to the cloud - Part One
Backup to the cloud - Part Two

I am glad I introduced the concept to so many people.

Labels: Backups, Cloud, Data Security, Web

Having decided to use a remote backup solution and what I wanted to backup, the next things to look at were to decide on were how I was going to do the backup and which provider I was going to use.

After some looking around I settled on BackBlaze as my remote backup provider. Unlimited disk space for $50 a year didn't seem unreasonable at all.

To be fair the unlimited storage does have some limitations though. It applies to one machine and any disk drives attached to it - except network drives. This is a slight problem if you have your data spread across four machines and some network drives as I do.


I decided the best thing to do was to build a PC specifically to handle backups. As long as this PC held a copy of all the data that I wanted backed up then things should be OK. So I took an old PC I had kicking about (it's a Pentium II - remember them), reformatted all the drives and installed Windows XP. XP seems to run rather well on an old machine like that, its the applications that slow it down.

Next steps were to remove any unnecessary items that had been installed (msn messenger & such like) and disable any services not required to store files & connect to the internet. This was followed by installing a virus scanner and the rather long wait as it downloads all the updates and patches for XP to make sure we were protected from all those nasty threats on the web.

It really dosn't matter if the machine is a little slow anyway as the crucial bottle neck is broadband upload speed. In case you hadn't realised ADSL stands for Asymetric Digital Subscriber Line - The Asymetric bit is critical. Downloads are a hell of a lot faster than any uploads and there doesn't seem to be any real way to improve them.

I ran the BackBlaze Speed test to get an idea of what sort of speed I could expect and then ran the TCP otimizer to squeeze out every last bit of bandwidth I could. I seem to be achieving around 2GB a day so it's not great but it's acceptable. The next step was to install the BackBlaze software and configure it to ignore any stuff I didn't want backed up on the machine (like the windows XP install directory).

The final install was to load and configure All Way Sync to copy over all the critical information I need backed up from all the various machines.

For my initial backup I chose to backup everything except my image archive. The initial backup takes a long time as it has to copy up every file (6 Days in my case), but after that things should be much quicker as it just copies up changes.

I have now started adding my image archive to the backup. At 300GB I guess it will take 150 days to upload 7 years worth of images. I figure that isn't too bad, if it took me 7 years to create that much data, half a year to upload it is pretty good. Good job I am looking on this as a long term project.

Once this initial upload is complete things should work fine as long as I generate an average of less than 2GB of data a day, that's 700GB a year. At the moment I am at nowhere near that sort of volume, so it seems I have a workable solution.

Labels: Backups, Cloud, Data Security, Web

I might have mentioned it before but I make no apologies for mentioning it again, make sure you have your data backed up. There are loads of interesting and unusual ways that you can lose the information that you need and a good backup strategy is the only way to protect yourself.

Having taken the time to asses my existing backups and possible threats to my data I came to the conclusion that I had no real protection against a total loss event. What's a total loss event? Well in my case I can see some possible events that would fall into that category: flood, fire & theft. A house fire would melt all my hard drives, a flood wouldn't do them much good either and it is possible that some thieving toe rag could break into the house and clear out all originals and backups.



So how can I protect my data from total loss? Well traditionally the answer is off-site backups. An off-site backup is where you copy your data to disk or tape and then move those devices far enough away from you to ensure they survive a disaster. This is common practice in the business world. Alternatively, we can take advantage of the internet and backup to The Cloud. Having considered a system of swapping portable hard drives in and out of the house, I thought it would be worth trying out the cloud first as its the modern way.

The first decision was to decide what I wanted this backup for. For me this would be a "last resort" backup as I have a layered strategy:

• Currently active work on any PC is copied overnight to another PC using Allway Sync. This allows me to recover yesterdays work quite easily should I accidental delete or corrupt a particular file.
  
• Once a month each machine is imaged to a USB drive, using Acronis True Image. This is to protect against HDD failure and to allow me to recover files that are not on the daily backups i.e. ones I deleted a few weeks ago and suddenly realise I need now.
• Image archive. Once a month I move the previous months photos to my herd of buffalo.
• Cloud backups would add the final layer that allows me to protect myself from total loss and to go back to much older files if I need to.

First I looked at each PC and decided what I really needed to store off-line:

• Email is a major priority, all sorts of things can be kept in the various folders of an email system: logins to infrequently used systems, licence keys for downloaded software, travel bookings, reservations.
• Documents created in Wod, Excel,etc
  
• IView Media Pro catalogues, so I can find all my images.
  
• My Image Archive
  
• The latest release of Lemon
• A copy of my website including the templates used to generate it.

Some things I decided not to back up:

• Music: I don't think I need to keep a copy of my music as I have it all on CD & 2 hard disks. In event of a total loss I would just have to buy all those CDs again.
• Bookmarks: For some people their web bookmarks are essential but I hardly use bookmarking so there is no need to worry about them.
• Programs: As long as I have the licence keys I should be able to download the latest versions.

So now we have established the why and the what. In part two we will look at the how.

Labels: Backups, Cloud, Data Security, Equipment, Web