When I first got hired on at my last job, I took the opportunity to splurge on additional hard drives.  Because of the recent news of one blog company not having proper redundant backups, I felt that I should step up my CYA (“cover your ass”) game.  I’ve installed a 1TB drive but have not yet selected and configured a software solution to automate my backups…

Today Yurani called me to ask for some advice on external hard drives.  Apparently her Mac is now down to 24MB (!) thanks to music and all the high-res photos she’s been snapping of her clients with her new dSLR camera.  Though I directed her away from the mini, portable drives to a much more cost-effective 3.5″-based drive, I still recommended that she investigate uploading her photos onto a website.  I believe that an off-site backup is a great emergency measure.  Sure, I’ve got plenty of my photos burned onto high-quality, long-life Verbatim DataLifePlus CD-Rs, but they’re in the same apartment as my computer.  What if there was a fire?  They’d both wind up in flames.

My favorite benefit of “cloud computing” is access anywhere; it’s great not to have to sit down at a specific computer, at a specific location to have access to my files or applications.  Also, depending on your host, they certainly are likely to have their own backup methods, in case something happened with the particular server your information was hosted.  Certainly there are issues with the concept.  What happens to your files when the company goes under?  What about hacking?  A large corporation is a bigger, easier-to-find target than if you remotely log into your home desktop server.  Also, privacy and ownership.  Are you giving up certain rights to your work and information by agreeing to let your host sponsor the costs of your usage (particularly something to think about with free services)?

Right after the big party we had for my high school graduation, many of us went to the local arcade.  I put down my chunky Canon S30 camera and forgot to pick it back up.  Unfortunately, it was lost forever, as were all the photos of the memories from the party.  I am a pack-rat, and that applies to memories as well, so I greatly enjoy thorough documentation of my life through photos, videos, and journal writing.  Because of the value I place behind photographs, today I made an effort to upload my photos to the cloud.

Thanks to a benefit provided by my ISP, I have been granted a “pro” account at a leading photo-hosting service.  Unfortunately it’s a bit clunky to use, especially with how I want to organize my photos.  On my computer, they are organized by date, and I want to replicate that on the service.  I have the option of creating “sets” and naming them the same as on my computer, but that’s a tedious effort to do so individually for the massive collection I’ve amassed.  They have an official tool that lets me queue up several batches at once while creating new “sets”/folders, but it has crashed several times on me and is unreliable.  I’ve tried several other clients, but they do not allow me to create new “sets”/folders within the software before queueing up my uploads.  I finally found one that has a directory browser built in and is intended to do a direct sync, rather than just upload selected files.  When you select a folder on your computer, it automatically creates a new set using the name of the folder on your computer.  So far I’ve uploaded several batches of increasing size, and it’s been very stable.  I think it feels a bit slower than other software because it seems to only upload one file at a time, rather than a few concurrent uploads.  I can live with that limitation, though, as long as it doesn’t crash.  I can just set up a big overnight queue.  I think this will take a few days to get through, especially if there’s some maximum daily quota that I may not be aware of.