Trond Sørås Photographer

After last weeks ordeal with a harddrive going bad, I’ve decided to take action and be prepared.

This is going to be my daily routine from now on (or at least every day I use my mac to check e-mail, empty memorycards, etc).

Some people have already pointed out that the only truly safe way to back up data is offsite backup. While this is true, it is generally not practically possible while traveling, due to low quality networks and bad connections. When I’m working I produce as much as 20-30 GB every day, so uploading that back to my office in Norway is not possible; there’s simply not enough time.

• I will always travel with an extra external harddrive, equal in size to my internal one, which I will clone every night before going to bed. This clone will be bootable, so in case my internal drive goes bad, I can not only restore it fully; if need be, I can continue working off my external bootable drive.
• I will have my mailserver forward every mail I get to my Gmail account, which will sort it under its own folder. This is my backup mail, in case everything goes south.
• I will keep a version of OSX on an emergency USB flashdrive, which will also contain some select diagnostical software and software for repairing non-hardware-damages to the internal drive. This will be lightweight, which means it’s small and boots fast.
• The bootable flashdrive will also be used to restore my drive’s directories once every month. This is to both keep my drive healthy, but also to discover any faults before they become corrupted beyond repair.

Hopefully these simple points will prove sufficient, easy to follow, and keep me from loosing data the next time (knock on wood) my drive fail.