DannieG

After my semi-portable hard drive ( It’s a brick i hardly move it from my desk) failed on me, I finally realized that no matter what I do - the truth is - when a hard drive fails, it doesn’t care that all of your portfolio, baby pictures, projects, wacky videos, are on it. Like they say : Harddrive crush, relationship fail, people die - there’s nothing we can do about it!

Since this is the second time for me to loose EVERYTHING on a hard drive (the first time was due to my own stupidity), it’s time to learn from mistakes and find a more safe way to keep my files - So after a day of comparing, researching I’ve come up with a somewhat bullet proof file storage plan.

. Frist thing frist, photo hosting service is dirt cheap - so why do i still keep them on the hard drive so it can be lost in a crush?! hum that sounds rather dumb, from now on all of my photos goes straight to Flickr (don’t have a heartattack, most of them will be set to private)

. I signed up for a Amazon s3 account, it’s online storage a la cart. (Pay only for what you use -$0.15 per gigabyte-month of storage used - $0.10/0.18 per gigabyte of data uploaded/downloaded)

. I Then purchased and downloaded JungleDisk - it’s a desktop client to use with Amazon s3 web storage service.

. But MOSTLY IMPORTANT - Make and update backup CDs once a month, CDs are cheap, long lasting + reliable so i don’t have to worry about it crushing.

All as well, it did took me 100s of important projects lost to realize the importance of a reliable storage + the true meaning of file backup.

Hope everyone learn from my mistakes and take a better care of your important files! As portable hard drive becomes more and more unstable, the only drive that should remain portable are those mini usb ones, I do believe the web storage is a better solution, but currently majority of the web storage company are labeling their prices a bit too high, let’s hope in the near future all online storage will be dirt cheap.