Tag Archives: Backup

Update on My Drobo

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My new Drobo has been in active use for over a week now and I am very happy with it. I first heard about the Drobo on TWIP–This Week in Photography, a weekly photo podcast. These guys were raving over the Drobo and I was slowly but surely running out of backup room on my external hard drives. So I saved my money and just purchased my own Drobo.

I spent the past week moving my photographs from the external drives to the Drobo. This would have been an easier chore if I had maintained a consistent folder-naming scheme all along. But alas the end is now clearly in sight and I expect to have the transfers down in a few short hours.

I only have two 1TB hard drives installed in my Drobo and it is already 67% full! I will have to install a third drive into my Drobo in the near future. One nice feature on the DataRobotics website is what they call the Drobulator, which is a virtual calculator which allows you to see how much storage space you will gain with different hard drives. I used this to determine my next cost-effective and best storage space-addition drive will be another 1TB drive.

The Drobo was very easy to set up and install. I just installed the two hard drives into the unit, attached the power cord and the USB cable, and then installed the software. Now the Drobo Dashboard gives me a constant status of space available and other important information from the Drobo. I just watch the lights on the unit, which will turn yellow when it is time to add additional storage. I also receive email messages from Drobo whenever the unit has a message for me. Pretty neat!

I have not always been faithful at backing up my photos so I find the Drobo to be extremely helpful and even vital in my workflow. To maintain proper backups I strongly recommend the Drobo. It works well and is easy to use.

More Rain but Some Constructive Photo Learning Nevertheless

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It is raining in the Poconos once again. Rain, rain, go away!

But instead of letting it get me down this time I started reading a good photo book, made a plan to backup all my photographs, and started fixing a desktop computer to connect to my network.

The book is Scott Kelby’s, “The Digital Photography Book, Volume 3” and I cannot say enough about this book. Let me, however, say this, “I already ordered Volumes 1 & 2 and I’ve only had Volume 3 for one day.” Buy this book if you want to get some creative ideas for your photography. It is well worth the price and time to read this incredible book.

My backup plan started with a few paragraphs of Scott’s book, which referred me to an article on his blog. The backup scheme he uses is solid and I decided to adapt slightly a few of his ideas and use them for my backup procedure. I will follow his advice of making sure I have two copies of each photograph before reformatting a flash card, In my case I will use my laptop for one copy and a portable hard drive for the second copy. The OWC portable drives caught my eye and I plan on purchasing one soon and another one in the near future. They are smaller than the external drives I have been using up to now. I also plan on breaking down and buying a Drobo. I first heard about this little robot on “This Week in Photography.” The redundant backup scheme of this little guy far exceeds the RAID option. I will have to save a few pennies first, but since I recently acquired the 24-70mm zoom lens, I figure it is okay to spend a little dough to protect my photographs.

The desktop computer is one that I haven’t used in a while, but I want to utilize a good laser printer that I acquired and connecting this desktop to my network should allow me to do just that. I have to work around one minor monitor issue, but after that I should be up and running.

It is raining, but I’m still thinking a lot about photography nevertheless!