The reasons to back up data posted: 11 Jul, 2010
Backing up. yes we all know we should, we all know how important it is, we all forget to do it sometimes and yet in some ways it has never been easier and there has never been so many different options, so, here are some tips which we have tried to tailor to the escort industry.
- Work out what you actually need to back up, remember hard disks fail and CD’s can get lost or damaged. A very common problem is loss of photo disks, or moving computers.
- How do you want to backup your data, is a simple copy of a disk sufficient, or indeed multiple copies, or do you need to keep copies of data which is regularly changed, i.e. website text, advertising details and receipts which you may need to access quite often.
- Back up e-mails in an external programme, PC Mail programmes fail, and corrupt data as we have found out in the past to our cost.
Once you have established the basics it is time to look at the various options.
At the very least burn of a copy of your pictures and important documents to disk, and try to do this regularly if the information changes, a collection of CD’s is better than lost and irreplaceable data.
Another option for content which changes regularly is to buy an external and portable hard drive, copy important files to it and store it securely. The cost of storage has dropped considerably in recent times so this is a cheap and flexible option.
There are a number of programmes depending on your operating system to help with these, search back up or file sync utilities on download sites such as tucows.com
Recently the move has been towards “cloud” computing, that is placing information on multiple redundant servers on the internet, rather than have your information on one server or your own computer, it is spread across multiple backups to ensure if one fails there is no loss of data, and there are many web services offering options, both free and paid.
Firstly back up important images to a photo service such as Flikr (http://flikr.com). A free account will allow you to store a large number of images and selecting the “private” option keeps others from viewing them.
For mail set up a Google mail account (http://mail.google.com) and copy any mail sent or received to it (or of course use it as a primary mail account). Google offer a massive amount of free storage, 7.5 gigabytes, with every mail account and this is a simple and effective way of archiving e-mails and address books.
Google also offer a free on-line set of applications to mimic Microsoft office, you can import your word processor or spreadsheet documents into them and again store (and access) them on line. http://docs.google.com.
So the obvious question is what do we do? The answer is a combination of most of the above, as we use apple macs here we have access to their mobile.me servers for image storage and synchronising address books and calendars (although we have switched file storage to Amazons excellent if very techie S3 storage) as well as some excellent small programmes for backing up data such as mail and password logins. We have also moved a large proportion of our client management systems onto the “cloud” it allows us to work more efficiently, and from different locations if we are travelling without disturbing our work flow. We also have a large archive of old files stored securely off site.
The moral is, whatever you do, do something, a crash or loss of data can be very painful as we have found out before, for independents and agencies the loss of photos can be impossible to replace and very costly to recreate in a new photo session.