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Big Computer 3 is one year old! - part 3 of 1 2 3 4 5 6

by Mike McNamee Published 01/06/2009

7. Once the album is complete you should make your final hard drive backups and at that time also make a double set of DVD backups.
8. Your housekeeping should be arranged to catalogue and store older weddings in some way. Some people use DVDs, others use a removable hard drive and store each drive in a cupboard.

At this level, the average photographer could use a simple external hard drive as their 'discrete drive' option. For preference this should be a single drive, USB connected and with a simple format such as NTFS. In the event of a housing/wiring-based failure, the drive could be removed and mounted in another computer for data recovery although if it failed your first port of call should be to make a new copy of your files on a new detachable drive before you start to sort things out. This way you are not as vulnerable to a machine failure in the interim period.

Availability

How secure you wish to be against hardware/software failure defines your availability requirements. This also incorporates your firewall, intrusion and virus protection. Availability is only maintained when two identical systems are running in parallel so that you can move seamlessly from one to the other. This is a little fanciful for the average jobbing photographer but certainly has some implications for, say, the production of a magazine or corporate report. Professional Imagemaker is time critical in that if we missed the delivery date for say Focus or the Convention our advertisers would be miffed (ie refuse to pays us!). We therefore work hard to ensure that we are not vulnerable to computer failure. Do not imagine these are rare threats; in the last few years we have had motherboard failures, RAM failures, a lightening strike, a computer fire, hard-drive failures and a fire at the printers! If you are a high-street studio your main risk is probably theft.


Here is our working method. It would work for any photographic project that was time-critical.

1. Original material arrives by email, DVD or electronic transfer from the North Wales office. This is copied to the relevant sub folders in a folder called, for example 'Pi_JunJul09'.
2. As soon as more than about 10 pages are complete or more than a couple of articles have been collated, the entire 'Pi_JunJul09' folder is copied to another machine on the network. This is a Linux-based server with a mixture of RAID and plain drives.
3. The 'Pi_JunJul09' folders on each machine are set up as defaults in Beyond Compare so that they may be synchronised at any time.
4. Files are synchronised after any significant additions are made to the page layout, risking no more than a day's worth of workat any one time. Synchronisation is also carried out before any risky software additions are made. Ideally new software should be tested off-line or on a virtual machine but this has proved to be cumbersome. The equivalent threat to a jobbing photographer is probably a crippling virus attack via their email.
5. As the magazine draws towards the deadline date, fewer and fewer risks are taken and more frequent backups are made.
6. When the magazine has been fully set out and proofread the


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1st Published 01/06/2009
last update 21/07/2022 08:46:23

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