Don't forget to back up...You MUST back up

I just got a new external hard drive and the thing screams sweetness all over. I finally broke down and decided to spring for this tiny portable drive. It is a 250 gig Western Digital Passport and is so nice and small. The best part about it - no power brick!

While I have a larger external Western Digital My Book, I was finding that due to its large form factor and big power brick, I was not bringing it back and forth from my home and office to back up my data.

Right now, in order to have redundancy and overall general safety with my data, I back up my important data both at the office and at home. This not only protects my data against a hard drive failure - since I am backing up on 3 drives, but since my data is being backed up in two locations, I am also protecting my data against fire, water damage, hardware theft, etc.

Unfortunately, just the other day, I had a hard drive fail. This drive was not one of my primary drives and was more of a general back up drive for various older data. Since this was a rarely used drive, I never did have a full back up of its data...AND, since it was a rarely used drive and I have not looked at it in months, I don't even remember what was on it and what I lost...THIS IS WHY YOU NEED TO BACK STUFF UP. I was dumb.

At this point, I am testing out a new back up procedure to see how it works out. I've decided to use the new SyncToy 2.0 from the Microsoft PowerToys series to do my data synchronization. I previously used the 1.0 version, but found it a bit limiting since it wasn't smart enough to realize that when you use an external back up device the drive letters do not always stay the same and hence, your folder pairs don't stay together and your backup routine becomes a chore. As we all know, if your backup routine is hard, you simple are not going to do it!

The main data that I back up is all my photographs. Currently I have about 80 gigs worth of photos - RAW files, original JPGs, edited Photoshop files, etc. I've organized my data by year and then I have sub-folders within those year folders to organize by date/event. I've set up each year's folder as separate folder pairs within SyncToys initially just to get a clean sync of all my data and then later on, I'll set it up to just sync the whole drives.