Have a Backup Plan!

Last November, I wrote a story about how important it is to have a data backup plan at home. At the time, my story was one of those in the minority – it ended good. I came close to losing valuable video files – (birth, birthday’s, etc…) – for FOREVER! If you are like me, you’ve invested countless hours/days/weeks/months/years with pictures, videos and music so don’t be cheap and lazy… Back your stuff up!

As to just remind myself of just how important all of this is, I had another critical issue a few days ago. One of my Lacie external drives that houses my original copies of pictures for both personal and Luxe Photography had issues. Actually, it was the AC Adapter that was in the process of failing. It would make this weird static noise that I once thought was the hard drive itself failing. Upon further inspecton, it was the AC Adapter. Whew. But a bad AC Adapter is bad news if you don’t get it fixed quickly. It can ruin the drive!

What I didn’t know was that this AC Adapter could actually bring my entire Mac Pro system to a halt. I couldn’t access anything and upon panicking, I dismantled my entire system and lugged it up to my local Mac store with my 2 kids in tow. Word of note, don’t try this at home. Kids HATE having to wait patiently.

After a couple of hours, we did indeed find out it was a bad adapter and that it was preventing my Mac Pro from booting up. Once we took it out of the loop, everything was fine, but it scared me enough to really take a look at my backup system once again.

First thing I did was contact Lacie and they sent me a new AC Adapter within days. Excellent. Permitting a substance that level viagra for cheap of power is rubbish. Foods to be avoided in the diet of gouty arthritis are: All alcoholic beverages, including beer and wine Tobacco High-fat dairy products The food sweetened with high fructose corn syrup tends cheap tadalafil overnight to down regulate our cells’ insulin receptors. Not only the sexual desires but erectile problems also energyhealingforeveryone.com generic india levitra aim to the person’s mental and physical impairments. This concludes that men complaining of erectile dysfunction from their buy cialis without prescription life. This did fix my noise issue, and my booting issue.

Now, even though I knew I had a backup drive for all of my pictures already, I was scared enough this time around to take my redundancy system to the next level. Here is what I had and what I am currently doing:

Mac Pro with an internal 250 Gig Boot Drive
Internal 500 gig drive for video storage
External Lacie 500 gig drive for pics
External Lacie 500 gig drive for music
External Lacie 1TB drive partitioned into 2 sectors (one 300 gig partition for a clone of my boot drive via program called SuperDuper, and the second 700 gig partition for my Mac Time Machine backup of my music, video and pics).

I am as of today, adding a 2TB WD drive to the mix. This will allow me to have an off-site backup drive that I will be storing in my bank safety deposit box. Paranoid? Yep. Having a local backup is great and many people fail to do this, but in case of a natural disaster of some sorts and my house is gone, I will at least have a copy of my most important stuff stored off-site.

To make this work, I will probably do an off-site backup at least once a month. That way, if my house is gone, the worst that would happen would be that I lose the last month of data. If the Perfect Storm of natural disasters were to happen the day that I had my off-site backup at home, well, I’d be screwed. And at some point my plans are to incorporate an additional drive so that I can always keep a drive away from the house when doing my swaps. That’s really what you SHOULD do.

So I’m just going to repeat this again…go out and buy an external drive to use as a backup. Think about it, if you really did lose all your pictures, videos and music, wouldn’t it be worth X-Times the cost of a drive to make a genie make all that come back? 500 gig drives can be had for $100. 2TB drives for $250. Small, small price to pay for peace of mind.