About a month and a half ago, I lost my new camera somewhere in New York. I spent a day and a half looking for it, but I pretty quickly accepted that it was gone. I’d only bought it at Christmas, so there was no homework to do—I was getting the exact same model again, the excellent Canon SD600.

Having to replace a lost or stolen item is a frustrating process. But as I dropped $200 on another camera, I stopped for a moment to be thankful for what I didn’t lose: In just a month and a half of service, that first camera covered Christmas with the family, as well as my first few weeks in New York, a total of 681 pictures. In the weeks since I bought its replacement, I’ve been to Vermont, Boston, Philadelphia, and D.C., where I’ve racked up over a thousand more snaps.

That camera’s memory card was empty. I didn’t lose a single picture. And yet, for the vast majority of those pictures, the only copy was on my laptop. A small minority were posted to Facebook albums… but Facebook is a display mechanism, not a backup. I was long overdue for a proper backup solution.

Backup

I’ve written previously about using rsync and cron to back stuff up remotely. But when I wrote that, I was talking about 50 MB of assorted PHP scripts and SQL dumps from a forum and a blog. I wasn’t talking about 10 GB of photos and 12 GB of MP3 files. Even with incremental backup, that’s a tremendously large initial bandwidth commitment.

I wanted something quicker and easier, which meant going local. There were two options: writable DVDs, or an external hard drive.

As I stood in the Fifth Avenue Apple Store clutching a meagre package of DVD-Rs, I knew already it was a band-aid, not a cure. I’d burn the discs once, I’d never verify them ever, and I’d only occasionally update an incremental disc. I put them down and wandered over to look at external drives.

I ended up buying a bad-ass LaCie 320 GB, for—with the tax—almost exactly $200. Is there not some poetic about that? It came formatted for Mac, it came with the cables I needed to hook it up, and it came with software for a one-touch dump of my whole home directory. Not just the photos and music, but all of it. Whoosh.

Peace of Mind

Backup and peace of mind is kind of a cliche. In reality, anything important I do on my computer is on other computers that I’m shelled into. If I lost my computer, there would be a period of mourning, and then I would simply buy another and move on.

But at least now if I lose it, it’s only a matter of a financial setback, and not also an emotional one.

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 2:23 am to Culture, Soapbox.