This may be interesting only to those of you who believe in backing up your files. I am obsessed with it, but I have never found the ideal solution.

I have over 32,000 photos and short video clips. I have two automatic backup systems on my desktop. One is a local program, ShadowProtect, which periodically and automatically creates an image of my computer on an external hard drive (for the technically minded, this is a NAS). The other is CrashPlan, which automatically backs up my files to the cloud.

The other day, I had the brilliant idea to move my photos and videos to an external hard drive to make room on my desktop’s hard drive. Step one, all I copied the files to the hard drive (NAS-different from the one opn which I store my backups). Step two, I verified that the pictures were actually there. Step three, after confirming that the files had been moved successfully, I deleted all the files from my desktop. Voila! More space!

Here is the problem. Neither one of my back up systems backs up network drives like my two external hard drives. The problem with the external drives in my den is that if we had a fire or theft, those drives could be inaccessible. Backing my data up to the cloud meant that I could still get my files back. I just moved 32,000 files to a device that is not backed up at all! All that had to happen was for that one drive to fail, and I would have lost everything! As a stop gap measure, I am copying the photos and videos to my second external hard drive. That solves the problem of a single drive failure, but not the problem that I don’t have an off-site backup. There are work arounds for getting CrashPlan to back up a network drive, but that will take some additional work, and in the meantime, I didn’t want to risk a drive failure.

By the way, if you don’t back up now, there are versions of CrashPlan that are free and better versions that are inexpensive. All work automatically in the background. There is no excuse not to back up. If you have a laptop, you are especially at risk for losing all your valuable information.

Follow up: The work around for backing up a network drive using CrashPlan is somewhat arcane, difficult to set up the first time, unless you are an experienced geek. I got it to work with some instructions I found on a web forum. I am not sure how reliable it is, so I will have to monitor it. If you have lots of photos or other precious date filling up your hard drive, I recommend getting a second internal drive, which CrashPlan can handle easily.

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