Department of Redundancy Department
A week or two ago, the mountain side at this end of the valley caught fire. 800 acres burned before it was put out. I can't even remember why now, but I was down town when it started. Driving home I could see the plume of smoke rising into the air. I could tell it was from my corner of the valley, but didn't think too much of it at first. I was sure that as I drove along and my perspective changed I would be able to tell that it wasn't anywhere near my house.
However, the longer I drove, the more it appeared to be dangerously close to my house. What is the first thing that would come to your mind if you feared your house was on fire? Your children? The cash you have rolled in a sock in the bottom of your sock drawer? For me it was my photos. I've well over 200GB of digital photos I've taken over the last five years or so. I'm not sure why I'm more afraid of losing the digital photos and don't seem to worry as much about the hundreds of slides I have boxed up. Maybe it's because I have a fair chunk of the slides scanned. On the other hand, it's not anywhere near close to being all of them and they would be just as lost in a fire as the digital files. Maybe it's because my life revolves around the digital world so that's where my mind goes first.
At any rate, I'm getting closer and closer to my house and I'm not getting the reassuring perspective I hope for. In fact the closer I get the more nervous I become that my neighborhood might actually be alight. I was just sick thinking about all the photos I would lose. (In case you're wondering my laptop was with me in the car, so that wasn't a concern.) Finally as I get to my exit I can tell that fire is actually not threatening my neighborhood. Still, the first thing I did when I got in the house was sit down and start looking at on-line backup services: someplace to store my photos that is not in the house.
There are a couple out there that offer unlimited backup space for a nominal monthly fee. Carbonite and Mozy are probably the best bang for your buck. I actually use Carbonite to back up my work files and, while I do have a few beefs with the software occasionally bogging down my laptop, it genreally does a pretty good job and the peace of mind is worth $50/year. The one catch they both have is they won't back up external drives. I've considered buying a desktop and packing it full of a few terabytes of hard disk space just to spite them, but it's not really in the budget right now. There are several others that give you a few gig for free, but when you start talking about hundreds of gig, things get ridiculously expensive. We're talking hundreds of dollars a month. I don't know what they're smoking. For that kind of money I could set up my own co-located server and that would be backed up as well.
In the end I bought two more 500GB hard drives. That will have the photos on three different hard drives, one of which will be kept in a safe deposit box at the bank. Periodically I'll take the more up to date drive to the bank and bring back its mate to sync up. May not be high tech, but I only spent $170 on two Western Digital drives. Most services were charging twice the price for 1/2 the space. And again, the $50/year or so for a safe deposit box will be worth the peace of mind.
Next time it looks like my house is on fire, I won't have to freak out over the possibility I might be losing all my photos.