Protecting what is near and dear to my wife, her pictures
If there is one thing that my wife is, it's a picture fanatic. She literally takes hundreds of pictures a month! If you don't believe me, ask my family, friends, and Facebook contacts.
My job of course is to keep these pictures safe! This job is considerably harder though because she stores her pictures everywhere. I can never seem to figure out why it's such a hard concept to simply store all pictures in one place, the most obvious place, being the My Pictures folder.
Keeping pictures stored everywhere on a computer makes my backup job a littler harder, but there are a few different ways I can go about getting this done.
I could backup the entire PC, including files I don't need to protect. This strategy is pretty simple but the consequences are high. Most users would avoid backing up the whole computer just to capture the images for the following reasons:
- Bandwidth is being used backing up things you don't need.
- Extra offsite storage space is needed, and hence the costs associated with storing so much data, is high.
- Backup time is longer.
- Restoration becomes difficult since the pictures are still hidden like a needle in a haystack.
- Restoration time is longer.
I could also spend hours manually selecting all of the picture folders. But this method is prone to problems because:
- It is a waste of my time.
- I will probably end up forgetting some locations.
- It won't backup newly added files my wife adds at a later date.
There is a better way than the full PC backup though. The answer is a technology included in ROBOBAK called Smart Crawl Template Backup. Smart Crawl Template backup utilizes file type template search to selectively find what to backup based on the type of the file. Think of it like an automatic picture search engine for backup.
Template backups don't end at pictures though; common patterns include office documents, music, and source code to name a few.
Each template can be applied to backup:
- All files matching the template.
- All files except for the files matching the template.
The best part about these Smart Crawl Template Backups is that you can specify a Template at the entire network level, effectively backing up all computers no matter which computer my wife happens to be on when she's downloading her photos!
Questions and Answers
Thanks to the relatively recent development of Deduplication technologies, US DataVault is not only more efficient for our Clients, but more profitable as well.
Most people can easily associate compression and deduplication in their mind, after all they have 2 common goals: 1. To reduce bandwidth going from the client to the backup server 2. To reduce storage space once the data resides on the backup server's storage volume
Very few people actually realize how much data they are storing on their local computers. What would happen if your computer crashed or got a virus and all your data was lost? Would you miss it? Many of us never think to backup our data until it is lost.
If you didn't believe all the noise about cloud computing in the enterprise before, perhaps the latest news will help you change your thinking....
When most people think of cloud storage, they imagine an infinite horizon of bits and bytes, a vast, limitless space in which to store their data. But cloud storage is sometimes not the avarice that people imagine. For applications that have heavy disk I/O activities or transfer a lot of data, cloud storage can become a significant cost and inherently limiting.
An Outlook .ost file is playing a major role in providing effective communication and managing user's data by Microsoft Outlook e-mail client.
The main issue with office based systems is the day-to-day running costs, with servers needing to be updated on a daily basis, and unless you employ an I.T. manager then running a server can be a costly business.
Accidently deleted your precious data from your iPod Classic? Don't panic. All you need is Photo Recovery for Win when you lose files from your iPod Classic. Follow this guide to do iPod classic recovery only by a few clicks.
Accidently deleted your precious files from your memory card? Don't panic. All you need is Photo Recovery for Win when you lose files from your card. Follow this guide to get back your card memory only by a few clicks.
Hard drives nowadays are becoming problematic and no matter whatever brand hard drive you use, it has been seen that clicking sounds are coming out of every second hard drive. If you think that you having a Hitachi, Seagate, western digital or any other hard drive would not cause this problem, then you are only in blue.
As time progresses, more and more backup applications (including ROBOBAK) are becoming Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) aware. VSS is a technology developed by Microsoft that allows a backup application to safely backup locked and open files. VSS works by creating a snapshot of the entire drive and then provides this information to the backup application so that the application can utilize the snapshot.
Very few people actually realize how much data they are storing on their local computers. What would happen if your computer crashed or got a virus and all your data was lost? Would you miss it? Many of us never think to backup our data until it is lost.
If you didn't believe all the noise about cloud computing in the enterprise before, perhaps the latest news will help you change your thinking....
Thanks to the relatively recent development of Deduplication technologies, US DataVault is not only more efficient for our Clients, but more profitable as well.
Discuss this Article
