Backups – are they really that important?
As it’s the end of the month I thought I’d ask your opinion – Are backups important?
For me, the answer is twofold:
1) Can I afford to lose any of my data? [No]
2) How long do I want to spend repairing/recovering any missing data? [As little as possible]For many people backups aren’t important and they don’t care about re-building their PC or MAC now and again when it get’s screwy.
As a photographer I’m fairly paranoid about my data (both business and pictures), but I’m fortunate to come from an IT background so I thought I’d share with you my backup procedure as part of my workflow.
If I’m on location then I’ll no doubt have my laptop with me, so I’ll transfer data from my memory cards to my laptop before I head back. The Laptop has an SSD so the data on it is pretty safe 🙂
Once back in front of my Editing PC I’ll import all the cards into a folder [yyyymmdd_client] and I won’t erase the cards until they’re about to be re-used, which ensures an extra level of recoverability.
I’ll immediately backup all the untouched RAW and .XMP files onto DVDs (which are stored off-site) and at the same time kick off a copy to my on-board secondary data disk and also to my server.
That’s 3-4 backups already and I haven’t even seen the files yet.
In addition to the DVD, local and server backup, I also have an external RAID box which I back up to when I’ve either finished editing and/or at the end of the day. There are 2 disks in there which mirror each other (RAID0). Every month I rotate out the second disk with a third disk which I keep in a top secret off-site location (my mums :)) and with the fresh disk in it’ll automatically re-build the Mirror.
When these disks are full, all 3 go into storage and are replaced by 3 brand new ones 🙂
So all in all I have 5-7 backups of my data. If the primary source fails then I have multiple redundancy methods to recover what I need 😀
My Laptop (which I use mainly for business use and an emergency editing PC) is backed up weekly to the server plus 1 extra external disk.
At the end of the month I have 3 off-site disks which I do another set of backups.
If that wasn’t enough I also run a Ghost of my system drive every 2 months, so if I get a virus or some new software or an update breaks the laptop, then it’s easy to re-install the last image and get back into action pronto.So far I’ve had to recover the Laptop twice from rubbish applications messing up my system, but the Ghost recovery takes literally about 10 minutes, which is no-time at all compared to a complete re-install from scratch.
If my SSD was to go kaput, then I have spare disks at the ready and I can be up and running in 15 minutes flat.
Worst case scenario – all my machines are attacked by ninja squirrels and trashed beyond repair.
My data is still safe in the HDD backups I keep off-site as well as the DVD’s which I can use as a last resort for recovery should I need them.In the future I see data being stored in a Cloud System, but current DSL is still too slow to upload at a decent speed 🙁
So, do you back up or don’t you believe it’s worth taking the time to do it?
How to build a PC for work purposes #4
So, following #3, all we have to do now is use simple methods to improve the performance of your PC/MAC.
The Pagefile
If you have 2 or more disks then you can move your windows pagefile onto the second disk. The pagefile is used by windows when the memory is used and so it caches some of it’s data using the pagefile. Moving it away from the disk that holds your Operating System will improve performance as it will utilise both disks rather than trying to read/write from a single disk while working.
The only exception to this is when your OS disk is much faster than your second disk (see SSD below) in which case it’s quicker leaving it as-isDisk Performance
Disks vary in performance, but are getting faster all the time
The fastest disks you can get today are SSD (Solid State Disk) and are basically the same as a keyring memory stick, but with a bigger capacity and set in a laptop HD case. Unfortunately they’re still an emerging technology and so they’re not cheap (£1 per 1Gb at the time of writing).But the benefits are:
No moving parts – virtually indestructible (take note laptop users 😉 )
Not affected by magnets – it’s all silicon and solder
SpeedTo elaborate the speed difference, regular SATA hard drives (HDD) have a seek time of approx 0.18ms (milliseconds). Pretty fast for sure, but becasue SSD have no moving parts, their seek time is about 0.01ms. Doesn’t sound like much, but when your system tries to access 2,000 files during a boot-up it shows.
Added to that, regular SATA HDD have a read/write transfer rate of about 70-80Mb/s maximum. SSD transfer data is about 220mb/sFaaaast
To put it in perspective, I installed a Samsung PB22-J 128Gb disk on my system and used Ghost to copy from my old 40Gb C partition on my old 320Gb HDD to this new disk leaving 78Gb spare (my old disk has been added to my external backup pool).
My old disk would boot my system from start to screen up in just over 60 seconds. Now it gets to screen up in 22 seconds.
I set the spare 75Gb as an S drive and only use it for pagefile and scratch data for photoshop and other applicationsHonestly, 128Gb is excessive for what I do, 64Gb would have been enough (40Gb+24Gb scratch), but it’s good to have a little wiggle room just in case.
Scratch Space/Disk
Lots of programs and operating systems use temporary areas to perform tasks in the background or write temporary files. By allocating the scratch space to use either a fast disk (SSD) or a second disk then this will also increase performance as you won’t be ‘stealing’ disk time from the operating system/program disk.Well, that’s about it. I’ve kept this series fairly simple so that most people can follow the logic and theory behind the principles I’ve written.
Feel free to comment or ask questions belowHow to build a PC for work purposes #3
So, following #2, the plan is to get a dedicated processing/editing machine and build it to the right spec and operating system for your work.
Now comes a crucial part, one which could be a lifesaver (figuratively speaking).
This post is the genesis for these series of posts and I hope if read only one of them, then this is it.A friend of mine once said, “There are 2 types of people. People who back up and people who’ve lost everything”
How to stay safe starts with how you set up your PCA bugbear of mine is that you buy a PC/Laptop and the manufacturer has a pre-installed copy of Windows/Linux/Mac on there that uses the entire disk.
Good right?
Wrong. It’s a bad way to work and I’ll give you an example of how it should be set up and why.If you go out and buy a massive harddrive (500Gb+) and install your system and off you go then you’re in for a potential fall.
If you only have 1 hard drive (as in a laptop) then you need to partition it into at least 2 sections.C drive – Operating System (OS) and program partition
D drive – Important/Work DataDepending on the OS you use determines the size of the C partition you need. For example:
Windows 2000 – 10Gb max,
XP – 20Gb max,
Vista – 40Gb max,
Windows 7 – 40Gb maxThe above will be more than enough to hold your OS and editing programs and that’s all it should have.
If you have 2 discs in your machine, then Keep the C partition the same sizes as above and use the remaining space as scratch space for programs or a temporary area for unimportant things that don’t matter if they’re lost.
Use the entire 2nd disk for your important data only.Now you have your system installed on the C drive, install all patches and updates as required and install programs so it’s ready for use.
But before you start you should use a tool to ‘snapshot’ your system. Norton have a program called Ghost which works extremely well at this and only costs approx £40. I only use the ‘recovery disk’ which provides the snapshot of the C partition and don’t bother with the rest of the Ghost application.So why do this?
Imagine you get a hard drive failure or a virus or some corruption that trashes your system.
What are you going to do?
If the system is lost or corrupt then you need to re-install the whole thing which can take a day+ depending how many applications you have and then to reset it to the way you like as well as recovering files for applications etc.
With Ghost, you can have your system back up and running within 15 minutes.The one proviso is that you do a Ghost of the C partition regularly (I do mine on the 1st of the month) and you only need keep the last 3 months available.
Now you know why it’s pointless having your system as 1 big drive as you’d end up having to ghost everything every time, not just the core of your system.The D data partition should have it’s own backup schedule which will be more frequent and should be replicated at least weekly to an external source. I replicate my data every time I add images to my library and for ‘critical’ work or finalised images I also store it externally (webspace, DVD storage etc.) to ensure recoverability.
I’ve had to do recover my system a few times and files a couple of times and this simple practise has saved me a huuuuge amounts of time and stress by just having a snapshot of the system to hand and recent copies of my important data.
Ironically I attended a workshop recently and the photographer was waxing lyrical about how film was for forever and digital images can be lost with a hard drive crash.
I didn’t interrupt him but inside all I could think was that if he had a fire in his studio then he’d lose all his transparencies forever.
Now you’re armed with the information above, your know that your system is much more safe and your critical files are recoverable.
With film there’s only 1 transparency, but digital can easily be replicated (thankfully) and this should be part of our workflow.How to build a PC for work purposes #2
So, as in #1, the plan is to get a dedicated processing/editing machine.
What you get it entirely up to you, what your budget and OS preference is.
If you have technical person who looks after your machine(s) then it’s worth asking them how much it costs for a home-built machine Vs a pre-built one.Any IT person worth a salt will be able to put together a high-spec machine for a lot less than a shop bought one (including labour time)
For example, my current editing machine cost me £1000 to put together.It’s based on the latest Pentium processor (i7) which has 8 virtual CPU’s. It also has 12gb super fast RAM (1866), a 1Gb ATI graphics card (single) and SATA Hard drives (faster read/write to the memory). I run Windows XP64 on it, but that’s through personal preference and because Adobe’s 64 bit version of Photoshop isn’t available for Mac‘s.
To buy a PC of the same spec would have cost me easily £2000+ (and even more for a MAC PC)
Plus, because I installed the operating system myself, I left out all the programs that are unnecessary which makes the system faster, more robust and virtually impossible to be ‘hacked’.It’s important to use a 64bit Operating System if you have more than 3Gb of memory (including graphics cards) as 32 bit operating systems can only see 3Gb of memory. It also means that applications that are 64bit ‘ready’ can access all the memory available.
For example, my XP64 only takes 600Mb of the system memory, so I allow Photoshop 10Gb of the remaining memory to use as scratch space (working space for processing)
Which is plenty 🙂
With a 32 bit operating system (or program) it won’t see more than 3GbI trialled the 64 bit version of Windows 7 a few weeks ago and it was pretty quick and a huge improvement over Vista. Everything worked well including communication to my cameras (kinda important) and the connection to my Epson 9880. My performance score was 5.6 – the weakest link being my hard drive speed, so I put in an SSD (solid state disk) which brought my score up to 7.3 (7.8 being the max)
But in the end I decided to stick with XP over Windows 7 mainly because W7 requires a few more button clicks to perform regular tasks which is a step backwards in my eyes. Looks pretty and for a normal PC use it’d be fine, but for my work/editing machine I chose efficiency and function over looks.In the end the machine has to fit your needs for the work you do. the Operating system and specification of it are normally defined by use and budget, but it’s best not to skimp as if you get a machine that saves you 30 minutes a day waiting for it to process by doing it faster, then youve saved 2-3 hours a week and what’s that worth?
