Sunday 9 November 2008

Do you ever backup your photos?

I think we now have around 11,000 digital pics on our home network - a result of having owned a multitude of digital cameras over the last 10 years. People like to sit in the armchair that sits behind my office chair just to watch the screensaver when it kicks in, as I have it set to display our photo library in a rapid, random sequence. The multitude of photos from all sorts of places and events captivates all who've seen it.

It would therefor be an utter disaster for us if my hard drive went up in smoke. We've had a NAS for a few years now (Network Attached Storage, for the less technically inclined amongst us) - it's a device about the size of a toaster that holds two hard drives, cost me about $350, and has more than enough storage to backup all 4 computers in our household (although I will probably upgrade to larger hard drives sooner rather than later).

Although the NAS is a nifty, if annoying bit of kit, I have been slack when it comes to backing up my stuff to it.

Then I found a Microsoft utility called SyncToy.

If you have something like an external storage device, and you find your current backup software to be a complete pain, try SyncToy. It's a free utility, and it's great. It doesn't have any scheduling ability, so it has to be run manually, but I only need to run it once every week or two to keep things up to date.

SyncToy. A good piece of kit. Don't be a lazy-arsed bastard and wait for your hard drive to crash before installing it.

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