With computers the one thing guaranteed to fail is your hard drive. OK, some of the new systems use flash drives but they fail without notice just like anything else. You may be wondering how I know this. Simple, I have had numerous old and new, right out of the box hard drives crash as well as CF cards I use for my executive portrait photography business.
Flash drives don’t have moving parts they do have connections and connections do fail. This means the information you have to keep will be on the only drive that gets damaged. No one knows why this happens but it is always the important information that gets lost.
You can have a dual drive system inside your computer, which will take care of drive failure and even many viruses that could force you to delete all files off an infected drive. This may be a great system until you have a break in and they take your computer.
I can already here people saying why not use an external hard drive for back up. Again this does work and will save you most of the time until the cat, dog or small child knocks the drive off your desk or the new roof leak drips just enough to ruin the drive placed on the floor where you thought it would be safe.
Another option is burning DVDs or Cd’s but that takes time and they seem to scratch at random. You would also have to have a bank lock box to keep them off premises in case of water, fire or theft. That gets costly and will fill up fast if you store a lot of data. Just like hard drive failure nothing will happen until the one day you forget to take the disk to the bank and it ends up damaged or stolen.
The best solution I have found is to use one of the above plus a second off site source. While many have heard of Mozy and Carbonite on line back up you can search the Internet and find several less advertised companies. The one factor I have been comparing is length of the back up. As a photographer I need to keep photo files for years and that is just too much information to keep on my desktop and don’t trust a DVD or external drive alone. I wanted a service that would hold my files until I removed them. Most do a great job at back up but delete the file 30 days after you remove, or accidentally erase it from your hard drive. Others may accept external drive data but require you to plug the drive in before the 30 days is out to prevent removal.
After a lot of research I found a Back Up Provider using Amazon servers that will allow me to upload 4 systems or several hard drives in my desk top plus 2 external and my laptop to a single account. The files stay as long as I am a member. I can erase them from my system and they stay in my external back up. No more 30-day time frame to worry about. They offer a 1GB free account, which may be good for student laptops and 15-day free trial for unlimited storage accounts.
The system I use and recommend is Elephant Off Site Back-up . I use it for my executive business portrait business and sleep sound at night knowing my files are secure.
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