MichaelDeM's Weblog

Managing Your Digital Life Blog March 4, 2009

One of the things I’ve been doing lately while going to college is getting more serious in my photography. My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic that my father gave me and I’ve been taking pictures ever since. Through school I took photography classes, learned darkroom techniques and was in the photo club taking pictures for the yearbook, etc. When I graduated High School in 1982, I began working for a camera store in Charleston S.C., got a Nikon F and specialized in architecture, scenic, and event photography. However, one day my kit was stolen out of my car and I wound up following my parents to Tampa Florida. There I worked as a bartender and did some serious work installing & maintaining satellite CATV systems. Having always a desire to serve my country, I joined the Army and wound out making a career out of it. Of course, wherever I went, be it field exercise or deployment, I had a camera with me to document my travels.

So, with that said, I’ve been getting up to speed with advanced digital techniques, building my networks, and surveying what’s new on the photography internet scene. One site I found today is Managing Your Digital Life MYDL is the creation of  Scott Bourne and Andy Ihnatko, both digital pioneers. The foucus of the blog is currently on backup devices and policies. Readers of the blog can get a pretty good deal at the Drobo Store. Although I prefer the HP EX470 Homeserver, the Drobo is an easy to set up and maintain file server & backup system.

I’m telling you folks, with memory and storage as cheap as it is today, you need to have a backup plan. It can be so simple to to back up to a 16 Gig flash-drive and another backup set to a off site for added protection. Just the other day I was using Adobe Elements and went to delete a folder I no longer needed. That resulted in deleting over 3000 images in my photos directory. Once that would have been a major disaster but I’ve managed to have copies of my images on a flash-drive, my PowerBook, the homeserver, Picasa, and on Dell backup. I copied images from the flash-drive to the hard drive and rebuilt the Elements catalog. Disaster adverted. I’ve purchased a copy of Adobe’s Lightroom. I’m hoping that helps me to organize my images better but if not, I’m going to go all the way with a Mac solution and use Aperture 2.