Hey everyone,
I know its been awhile since i posted anything, but I have been dealing with the end of the semester and various other things as well, one of which I will be discussing with you right now.
Backup your data!!
Seriously do it. If you have been putting it off, drop everything, and back it up.
About a month ago I had my power supply in my computer go bad, pretty much destroyed my entire system, total damage was around, $800 worth of hardware fried. But the worst part was not the hardware lost, that can be replaced. I lost about a months worth of work. Somehow 2 of my internal hard drives fried, there is no way to recover the data at all. This can be a huge issue if you are working for a client, they pay you for that work. I lost an entire project and I am still rebuilding the files from scratch.
What you can do:
There are various options when it comes to backing up everything. Im going to talk about 3 that I have started taking advantage of:
1: External Hard Drives and RAID Arrays
2: Cloud Storage
3: Physical Copies
External Hard Drives and RAID Arrays
External hard drives are, by far one of the easiest things you can do to help protect you data. Drives range in size and cost, some require extra power while others can be powered via the USB port. A safe bet is to look for something that will cover what your files take up now and give you plenty of room to expand, personally, I have a 2TB drive I use to back everything up on, but 500GB is also plenty big. Most drives are plug and play and your operating system (Either Windows or OSX) will format the drive correctly.
For those of you in the US, here is a link to Newegg's page listing all of their external drives: [link]
RAID Arrays (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) are a set of hard drives (2 or more) that store the same or pieces of data on them. There are various types or levels of RAID storage, but we are only going to talk about RAID 1. RAID 1 storage basically stores a duplicate of whatever you place onto it, onto each of the drives. So if you have 3 different drives, you have 3 copies of the same file, and in case one drive goes bad, you still have 2 copies left. This is a good solution, but can be tricky to pull off and can get expensive with the number of drives you would have to purchase.
Cloud Storage
This is another easy one, there are various services that offer cloud storage these days. Like Drop Box and the new Google Drive. The issue with these services is that some cost money depending on how much storage space you need, and the free services often have a small amount of space to use. These are great options because these companies often make backups of your data on a large number of drives to prevent any data loss of their users.
Physical Copies
This is one that I have started doing as of recently. Making physical copies of work. There are two options to do this. The first is to burn a data CD or DVD of finished work. Any work or projects that you have checked off or completed get burned to a disk, labeled with what is sorted on it, and stored in a place that does not get a lot of sunlight. The downfall of CDs is their lifespan, it is estimated that most CDs will only last about 9-10 years before the materials they are made of start to break down making the data stored on them unreadable.
The second solution can overcome this problem. Flash memory. Almost everybody has a USB drive they carry around with them, its easy, convenient, and safe for storing data on. That is because the drives use flash or "static" memory, it does not move. Unlike CDs, they dont break down overtime, but they can be a little more pricey than CDs, especially if you are buying a lot of them at once. A good option is to start looking and what work you have finished and making a copy of it into a folder, keep a text document of what is on the drive, and when the file gets to be so big (around 2 - 4GBs), buy a drive, copy the data to it, and sort it somewhere. Try and work out a labeling system along with it so you are not plugging in every flash drive trying to find the one with the project you want on it.
Again, here is a link to Newegg and all their flash drives: [link]
I hope this helps some people, I know I wish I had started doing this awhile ago. Depending on which way to choose to do this, just remember to back it all up at some point. You never know what could go wrong.
I know its been awhile since i posted anything, but I have been dealing with the end of the semester and various other things as well, one of which I will be discussing with you right now.
Backup your data!!
Seriously do it. If you have been putting it off, drop everything, and back it up.
About a month ago I had my power supply in my computer go bad, pretty much destroyed my entire system, total damage was around, $800 worth of hardware fried. But the worst part was not the hardware lost, that can be replaced. I lost about a months worth of work. Somehow 2 of my internal hard drives fried, there is no way to recover the data at all. This can be a huge issue if you are working for a client, they pay you for that work. I lost an entire project and I am still rebuilding the files from scratch.
What you can do:
There are various options when it comes to backing up everything. Im going to talk about 3 that I have started taking advantage of:
1: External Hard Drives and RAID Arrays
2: Cloud Storage
3: Physical Copies
External Hard Drives and RAID Arrays
External hard drives are, by far one of the easiest things you can do to help protect you data. Drives range in size and cost, some require extra power while others can be powered via the USB port. A safe bet is to look for something that will cover what your files take up now and give you plenty of room to expand, personally, I have a 2TB drive I use to back everything up on, but 500GB is also plenty big. Most drives are plug and play and your operating system (Either Windows or OSX) will format the drive correctly.
For those of you in the US, here is a link to Newegg's page listing all of their external drives: [link]
RAID Arrays (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) are a set of hard drives (2 or more) that store the same or pieces of data on them. There are various types or levels of RAID storage, but we are only going to talk about RAID 1. RAID 1 storage basically stores a duplicate of whatever you place onto it, onto each of the drives. So if you have 3 different drives, you have 3 copies of the same file, and in case one drive goes bad, you still have 2 copies left. This is a good solution, but can be tricky to pull off and can get expensive with the number of drives you would have to purchase.
Cloud Storage
This is another easy one, there are various services that offer cloud storage these days. Like Drop Box and the new Google Drive. The issue with these services is that some cost money depending on how much storage space you need, and the free services often have a small amount of space to use. These are great options because these companies often make backups of your data on a large number of drives to prevent any data loss of their users.
Physical Copies
This is one that I have started doing as of recently. Making physical copies of work. There are two options to do this. The first is to burn a data CD or DVD of finished work. Any work or projects that you have checked off or completed get burned to a disk, labeled with what is sorted on it, and stored in a place that does not get a lot of sunlight. The downfall of CDs is their lifespan, it is estimated that most CDs will only last about 9-10 years before the materials they are made of start to break down making the data stored on them unreadable.
The second solution can overcome this problem. Flash memory. Almost everybody has a USB drive they carry around with them, its easy, convenient, and safe for storing data on. That is because the drives use flash or "static" memory, it does not move. Unlike CDs, they dont break down overtime, but they can be a little more pricey than CDs, especially if you are buying a lot of them at once. A good option is to start looking and what work you have finished and making a copy of it into a folder, keep a text document of what is on the drive, and when the file gets to be so big (around 2 - 4GBs), buy a drive, copy the data to it, and sort it somewhere. Try and work out a labeling system along with it so you are not plugging in every flash drive trying to find the one with the project you want on it.
Again, here is a link to Newegg and all their flash drives: [link]
I hope this helps some people, I know I wish I had started doing this awhile ago. Depending on which way to choose to do this, just remember to back it all up at some point. You never know what could go wrong.
