Storage- Backing Up your Files

Possibly not the most exciting of topics but certainly a subject area that should be taken most seriously.

'Back up your work - regularly' is an instruction that many applications share with us and it is clearly good advice. 

On the Macs that we at iTutorus habitually use, as a part of the operating system there is a file (and possibly professional life) saving device called Time Machine. This extremely user friendly piece of software automatically backs up your work and not only can you retrieve lost data should your main drive cease working, you can also revert to earlier versions of your projects.

Over the last few months, despite our best efforts to protect and preserve our files, we have suffered the loss of three hard drives, all from the same manufacturer. In each case, the problems started with an ominous clicking sound and then error messages that the data could not be retrieved or the drive couldn't be read and would we like to initialise the drive!

Each of these drives was 2Tb in size and catastrophic is the only word I can think of to describe such data loss. But there's no point in dwelling on the past and in the hope of learning from our mistakes we felt the only realistic option for the future was to invest in more expensive purpose designed storage. The Glyph!

The Glyph drives in the picture below are now our principal storage units. They are 1Tb models but they come with data recovery guarantees should the unthinkable happen, again! 

There were guarantees on the hard drives that failed as well but it's important to read the small print and essentially the guarantees were extremely limited. 

Pictured also is a 1Tb Seagate drive which is highly portable, has a firewire 800 option and is ideal for moving small files around.