The Importance of Backups – a Personal Experience By Toya Heatley APSNZ
Just before Level 4 lockdown, my photography computer decided it was about time to retire. It had often been slowing down to a crawl, and trying to process my images was almost painful. The computer itself was eight or nine years old but over the years had received many hardware upgrades. It was a custombuilt PC that I purchased from Silicon Systems. Some of you will remember the chocolate bars at both the 2014 Central Regional and the 2019 National – these were donated by Silicon Systems. As I had had such excellent service from them, I contacted them for a quote to replace the tired old PC. We made the decision to go ahead with the new build while in lockdown. Silicon were considered an essential business, but alas delivery of some parts was slowed down by the overworked couriers and it was several weeks before my shiny new computer arrived. This is where the value of having a good backup system became apparent. My husband and I both work in the IT field and were comfortable with moving the data from the old PC to the new one, easy to do when things go well. There were three hard drives with a total of almost 7TB of data to move. The new PC also had three data drives to move it onto. This was done so we could easily sync with my online backup system.
Backups are important – never underestimate the value of your backups. Before I started transferring the files, I stopped the old computer from backing up. I knew my data was safe for 30 days and did not want the backup system to start deleting any data as the drives were decommissioned. I managed to copy two drives over and installed all my software, but when it came to the third and last drive, it started throwing up corrupted files. Lots of corrupted files, and the more we tried to copy, the more files corrupted. The drive was dying fast, and it had all my images from 2018 to the present on it. I use Backblaze.com, an online backup system with unlimited capacity for a very reasonable price. When I first started using their service, I had 4TB of photos and it took several months to upload all the data. You can send them a hard drive with the data on to seed the first backup, but I was happy to do it slowly. I received a few emails suggesting that their service might not be what I wanted because of the large amount of data, but the site said ‘unlimited data’ so I persevered with the upload. I am very glad I did!
Photo by Patrick Lindenberg on Unsplash
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