Happy November, folks!
Welcome to another edition of Tech Tails! This week in South Burlington, we’re prepping for the holiday rush by stocking up on popular items. Not surprisingly, I believe the Apple Watch is going to be a top seller in the gift category. Lately, I’ve been seeing parents in the store asking questions about the Watch with the intent of getting one for their teenager. These days, Apple Watch is leading the fitness tracking market, so I expect we’ll see them more and more in the high school demographic.
Last week I wrote a bit about the DSLR market and today I want to talk about storage options for photo archives. Exciting stuff, I know! But after the cold set in last weekend, I found myself at home organizing digital files from the past couple of years and finding a logical place for everything. The truth is, a single hard drive cannot be relied on, you need redundancy. My suggestion to everyone is always, important files should always be in two places. Following that rule, I usually use an application called SuperDuper to clone my hard drives, any time changes have been made. This week I also started mapping my disk inventory using a mind mapping application called Mind Node. I never thought of this until now, but having a virtual layout of all your hard drives and what era they cover can be very helpful. If you asked me, “where are those engagement photos you shot for your friend Mike last year?” I’d open MindNode and search for his name, and it would give me the location of the folder containing his photos. This could become a very useful tool if I were to somehow lose a pair of hard drives so I would know exactly what was lost. On the general topic of organization, I do not claim to have the best method. In fact, I’m really hoping to hear from our customers this week. How do you archive files? Do you organize by year or subject? A customer once told me all of his photo archiving was done by the TYPE of photo it was (portrait, landscape, etc.) and subsequently sorted by year.
On that note, I am due for another Seagate purchase. My archives are currently scattered across a handful of 1TB drives, and about once every two years I fill them up and retire the cloned pair. Naturally, I’ll always compare all of this to film, where I have a permanent hard copy in the form of negatives. This is one of the downsides of shooting digital. People take the seemingly unlimited shutter count for granted. You should make sure your photos are safely backed up somewhere, and prepare for the worst! Hopefully, these redundant backups are a waste of money, because your primary system never fails. Anyway, I’m going to get back to work here, enjoy our tech-y articles today!
Patrick McCormack
patrickm@smalldog.com