© 2010, Matt Vanecek. All Rights Reserved.
Happy Labor Day, all my United States friends! I hope everybody that had today off, had a great, relaxing time, and that everybody who had to work, didn’t have to work too hard.
For my weekly photographer suggestion, does anybody remember Steve McCurry? Steve was the photographer in the right place at the right time with the right skills and intuition to capture the picture of the Afghan Girl back in 1985. Steve has not been idle since 1985. Steve continues to showcase his work from distressed parts of the world. He is part of Imagine Asia, a non-profit seeking to bring education and health care to Afghanistan. Please visit Steve on his blog. You can also find out about his fine art, gallery shows, and workshops at his main Web site. Please do visit him!
On a more local level…
So, last week was interesting. I had major hardware failure the week before in my external hard disk array (which thankfully was used for intermediate work files that could be regenerated easily). The thing just stopped working and would cause Windows 7 to hang for minutes at a time. *sigh* There’s always something! Well, I poked around a bit and decided that I would replace the unit (a 4-bay Venus SiL 4726 unit, if anybody is interested) with a Drobo S. The Drobo S can hold up to 5 hard drives, and you can swap out a hard drive without powering down the unit or anything. The Drobo uses part of the total storage for data protection, so that when a hard drive fails or is replaced, whatever was on that drive is rebuilt automatically from the data protection area. Very cool, and much cheaper than the older RAID5 used in many data centers. And, unlike RAID5, the size/brands of the hard drives used doesn’t matter! You don’t have to make sure all the drives are the same size! This allows you to upgrade smaller drives to larger ones on the fly! 
So, with the Drobo, my entire hard-drive usage scheme had to change. I mean, you don’t get a Drobo S and use it for intermediate throw-away stuff. No! You use it for critical file storage! Like, oh, pictures, and videos, and customer records. What ensued over the course of last week was a very interesting series of rearranging hard drives, coupled with a purchase of a couple more hard drives to use for storing backups. Up to this point, I had been using Windows 7 System Image to make sure my system drive was backed up, and actually had my pictures “backed up” on the Venus unit. Well, what I needed to do was move my Windows 7 partition to a separate smaller physical drive, put my user data on another physical drive, and move all my pictures, videos, etc., out to the Drobo. Word to the wise: When using Windows 7 System Image, be aware that the Windows 7 recovery cannot recover the system image to a smaller drive.
Argh!! That was really annoying. So, I ended up purchasing Acronis True Image Home, which can do disk images (think Norton Ghost, but better), as well as ongoing and scheduled backups. True Image is capable of restoring disk or partition images to a smaller drive. Yay! I made an image of my Windows partition and an image of my User data partition–these were both on the same physical drive, and I needed to put the partitions on separate physical drives. I rearranged my hard drives in my computer (I’m kind of OCD–I want my system drive to be Disk 0, my user to be Disk 1, etc., and they hadn’t been). Then, I booted up with the Acronis recovery software and restored my Windows sytem (C:) and my user data (D:). Worked like a charm. Mostly. When I booted up, all my user files were owned by SYSTEM instead of by Matt, so I got dumped into a temporary user log on. After re-taking ownership of all my files, I also had to make a minor edit in the Windows Registry to delete the temporary user and rename my original user key back to its original name (it had been renamed with a “.bak” on it in the registry).
Ok, so I got all rebooted and started poking around to make sure everything worked. Yes! It did! I poked through my Lightroom catalogs, and ran an MD5 sum (a checksum, detects if any files had changed at all) on my video files. Everything checked out just peachy. I was ready to rock and roll!
The two new drives I bought: I set one of them up on my workstation for ongoing automatic backups. The other is for my and my wife’s laptops. Acronis True Image makes setting up the backups pretty easy. I’ve got one backup setup to create a new C: drive image backup on a daily basis, and I setup an on-going live backup for my pictures, user/business files, etc. When changes are detected, the deltas are automatically backed up to the backup drive every 5 minutes. I think this sounds suspiciously like Time Machine for Apple Macs, but I don’t know enough about Time Machine to say for sure.
In any case, my picture editing is now in a much more secure state, as it does not depend on me remembering to initiate a backup. And all my edits, etc., are automatically backed up as I go. So, besides the amazing fault-tolerance of the Drobo S, I also have stuff backed up to a separate hard drive!
I’m a little unsure what my next move should be: Another Drobo to replace the backup drive, or exploring Cloud backup solutions (online). I’m approaching 1.5TB backed-up data, when including my video assets. That’s pretty darn expensive when put up on a Cloud solution. I’m thinking maybe putting all my video assets on Blu-Ray discs for off-site storage, and maybe just uploading pictures to a Cloud solution. But for now, I feel much more secure having at least what I have in place, so I’ll put off-site backups on the important to-do list, but for now, it’s going to have to wait until more money shows up from somewhere…the Drobo S took quite a chunk of change…
