The Importance of Backups

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!

I logged into my account and started to download some of the missing files so that I could restore them. However, there were so many files missing that it would take me way too long to get them all back in this fashion. I tried downloading them in chunks, in zip files, but again they were slow downloading from the United States. I have decided to keep my external backup travel. You can never have too many backups!

I have friends and clients using Backblaze now and have managed to restore an entire laptop using this method successfully. So, I knew that my data was safe; I just had to get it here.

Another option that Backblaze offers for large restores is a USB hard drive which is sent from the US with the backup files on it. The cost was about NZ$300 for a 7.5TB drive, so I decided I should buy a copy of ALL my data. If the drive is returned once the files have been taken off, Backblaze will refund the cost of the drive. I ordered my drive and, conscious of the fact that my 30 days were running out, upgraded my account to retain data for 12 On day 22 of not having any backups done, my external backup drive arrived with all my data safely locked on it. The key to unlock the drive was tucked away in my online account. Within eight minutes of plugging in the external drive and unlocking it, my data was fully restored onto the new computer.

drive and from time to time I will also do a sync with it and my computer. This will give me another copy of my data that I can put somewhere away from the house when we months.

Thankfully, my new computer is now backing up to Backblaze - and all is good.

Silicon Systems Ltd – www.silicon.co.nz

Backblaze Backup Systems – www.backblaze.com

New PSNZ Accredited Judges

Congratulations to our newly appointed judges.

Marie Bilodeau LPSNZ has been appointed as an Accredited PSNZ Judge – Category Open. Marie can be contacted by email – mariebilodeau@xtra.co.nz or phone 027 570 1515.

Helen McLeod FPSNZ GPSA ARPS has been appointed as an Accredited PSNZ Judge – Category Open. Helen can be contacted by email – lechateau.desable@xnet.co.nz or phone 027 247 5318.

Toya Heatley APSNZ has been appointed as an Accredited PSNZ Judge – Categories Open and Nature. Toya can be contacted by email – toya@digitalpix.co.nz or phone 027 652 6292.

Shona Jaray APSNZ Chair, Judge Accreditation Panel