A Dogs Life Photo

This post goes out to my photographer friends out there and is not dog related. Well, at least not directly. It definitely applies to all of those prized photos of Fido that you have stored on your computer that you haven’t taken the time to save to an external source so you won’t lose them in the event of a computer crash or a disaster at your home…. God forbid. Even if you do back up all of your files religiously every day. This post is for you….

In the past two years, I have had not one, not two, not three…. but FOUR (4), yes four external backup hard drives crash on me.  Each one set me back at least one Ben Franklin. Worse yet, I was dumb enough to have some very important files (like client photos and “before” photos of the house that my husband has spent the past three years transforming into a fine piece of art) on them that I had already erased from my main computer. So, really, I needed to have a backup drive for my backup drive… which I did not do.

One drive broke because I tripped on the cord it it came crashing down from my desk. Another one just simply slid off the printer that I had it resting on top of that was sitting on my floor (so it was only like a 10 inch fall but it was enough to kill the thing). The other two just suddenly stopped working for no apparent reason.

I heard that there was a trick to get the data off the drive by deep freezing it. Supposedly, when all of the tiny parts inside of it are frozen solid, you have a small window of time to plug it in to your computer to grab the data before things thaw out out and start grinding together again. I don’t know. It sounds kinda wacky to me. But none the less… I have had two big hunks of metal sitting in my freezer for over a month now in hopes that this silly plan works. If not, I need to ship them off to a “safe lab” where people walk around in those big white astronaut looking suits with gloves and face masks to have them try to recover the data. And get this… it may cost up to $1500.00 for each hard drive!!!!! I can get a brand new computer for that much. Uuuugh.

I have always been very hesitant to use an online backup source because I have been concerned about the security of my files. There’s something unnerving about my private documents and my original, copyrighted photo files that I have worked so hard on floating around in cyberspace for anyone to get their hands on. Well, some friends assured me that this type of backup is safe because they have all of this fancy-schmancy encrypting of files that they do so nobody can actually view your documents unless they are logged into your account. So, I reluctantly started doing some research on them.

I checked out places like Mozy, Sugar Spice and the service available through my Norton Anti-Virus software. These services all base their costs on the amount of files that you store on them. for example, Sugar Sync is $10.00 a month for a total of 60 GB of space.  For the average computer user, that is waaaay more space then they would ever need. For people like me and the other photographers out there that I know, we would eat that up in a few months. I fill up a 4 GB compact flash in each photo session and never take the time to actually delete the files that I don’t use.

After much research, I decided upon a service from Carbonite. It’s $54.95/year for unlimited storage. Period. You can store as much as you want… for 55 bucks. Period.

These is a downside, of coarse. The initial backup of your files takes FOREVER! The backup works in the background while your computer is idle so it doesn’t slow down your computer. I am always on my computer so maybe that was the source of the problem. But I even left town for a 3 day weekend and left my computer on the whole time in hopes that it would catch up on my files. It was still only 75% complete when I came home.  Geeez!

It took about 4 weeks before the initial backup was complete. But since then, this service has knocked my socks off! My documents are saved within minutes after I create them. If my computer crashes, all I have to do is log into my account with them from another computer and I have access to all of my files!! I can even share all of my documents between my laptop and my desktop now without having to burn things onto a disc or save them on a flash drive to transfer them over. Now that I have someone helping me out with photo editing, I can give her access to my Carbonite account and she can work on my files from her own home. What more can you ask for!

It’s not often that I plug a product. I am really not a sales person. I will honestly tell you that I do get something out of it if you use this link to sign up with them. You would too if you referred people to use them. For every friend that you refer that buys a subscription, you get 3 months of the service for free!  So, if you do end up signing up and you heard about it first from me, please help me save my precious files and use this link to sign up with them.

If I had to summarize Carbonite it three words it would simply be… peace  of  mind.  Ahhhhhhh.