Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Back Up


The importance of backing up digital files was recognized from the earliest days of "mechanization" and "business information systems". The growth of digital photography brings this need to all of us. Today, losing digital files often means the loss of thousands of images. In spite of this, many of us skip backing up files, or do it in a haphazard fashion because of the time involved and the nuisance of tracking various versions of back ups.


For those of us using a Mac computer with "Leopard", Apple's latest iteration of OS X, the back up process has been streamlined and simplified. A program called "Time Machine" automatically backs up all changed files every hour. A clever structure of file pointers gives the impression of complete hourly back ups yet unchanged files are never copied a second time. There is no need to choose which files are saved, or when. And because the saved files are neither compressed nor stored in increments, they can be individually read, searched, and restored at any time.

A recent complement to this program is "Time Capsule", a combination of a wireless base station and large capacity hard-drive. When it is time to backup, the Time Machine program calls up the external hard drive, mounts it, and backs up all changed files. It then dismounts the drive which settles back to wait for the next back up or search for an old file. The Time Capsule, being wireless, can be safely tucked away in another room out of site from the computer.

A second copy of critical files can be saved to another hard drive to be stored in a separate location, or saved to a remote secure server on the web. This protects against catastrophic loss from fire, theft, or other damage. What was a chore on my old Windows systems is now a "piece of cake" thanks to Apple's customer oriented approach to computing.

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