Quebec has many old barns all around the contryside and I just can’t avoid taking pictures of them. They give me a sort of nostalgia of an era that is slowly fading away.  Here is an interesting picture of one of them at sunset.  It was good to see that the barn was still being used to store hay for the winter.

Here is another variation on the same theme but taken, this time, on a trip to Granby, Quebec.

I still have summer pictures I would like to share and I will later on this week.

The idea behind this additional equipment is to very easily and regularly create an exact replica of your hard drive and to store this replica away from your PC preferably in another place (i.e. your mom’s, brother’s or friend’s house…) This replica will have on it everything that’s on your PC so you don’t have to decide which files you backup and which ones you don’t.

So here is how I went about setting up this easy to manage backup solution using my RAID controller.

1- Started by installing the rack and tray in my PC so that now one of the two RAID member drives is easily removable.

Hard Drive in Rack

2- I made sure I knew which drive is which on the RAID controller software interface. In my case I have a PC that can support four SATA drives (0,1,2 &3) so I made sure that the drive that cannot be swapped (easily…) is connected to port 0 and that the rack/tray mounted drive is connected to port 2 (you’ll see why later…). I also installed the third drive I purchased into the additional tray.

Hard Drive in Tray

3- Once this was done I booted up the system and made sure that everything was working properly (i.e. the RAID drive was in a good mirroring state and full redundancy was available).

Now when I’m ready to make a backup I follow this procedure:

4- Shut-down computer
5- De-power the rack (their should be a power button on the rack).

Power Button On Rack

 
6- Remove the hard drive in the rack. Put this drive aside as it is now your new backup drive (in other words it’s an exact copy of the other drive still in your PC and it therefore has a copy of all your pictures.)
7- Re-start the computer.
8- Once PC is fully restarted, you should get a message telling you that one of the RAID member drives is missing and that data redundancy is lost.
9- Insert the third drive (not the backup one you just pulled out!) in the rack and power on the rack. Your PC and RAID controller will automatically find the new drive.
10- Using the RAID controller software reset the new drive to non-RAID. MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE NEW DRIVE BEFORE DOING THIS (This is where connecting the non-swappable disk to the port 0 comes in handy…) In my case I reset the drive on port 2 to non-RAID by right clicking it in the RAID controller software interface.
11- I then tell the RAID controller to rebuild to the new drive by again right clicking it in the RAID controller software interface.
12- The RAID controller will now rebuild the RAID drive and in a few hours (the time depends on drive size, processor speed as well as other factors…) you will again have a new set of mirrored redundant RAID drives.

Here is a short video demonstrating steps 8 to 12 on my RAID software (in my case it’s the Intel Matrix Storage Manager.)

So voilà! You now have a complete backup of your system (the drive you pulled out in step #6) that should now be store away from your PC. (I store mine at a friend’s house several streets away from my place…)

Every week or so I recuperate the drive stored at my friends house (she’s a good friend…) and repeat step 4 to 12. It’s so easy to do and causes almost no interruption in my daily workflow. So now should anything go wrong with my PC and (god forbid!) it is destroyed, lost (?) or stolen, I still have a full backup including all those precious photographs (and video, and music and emails, etc…) Thanks for the idea Bill!

In an upcoming post I’ll discuss how again a RAID drive can help you quickly get your PC up and running again in the event of a boot up error that sometime happens after trying to update the operating system software.

Have a look:

Didn’t get to use my camera as much as I would have liked down in New York but again with three girls tailing me all the time my picture taking opportunities were a little limited Thanks to Bill and Kathy (friends down in NY) though we did get to walk up onto the Brooklyn Bridge amongst the crowds of people.

I’ve got to try and get down to NYC one day all by myself with my camera and tripod, the picture taking possibilities are simply endless…

Before this happens and you end up paying several hundreds of dollars on a data retrieval company to POSSIBLY recover your precious pictures, let’s try and be proactive and implement a very simple solution onto your PC that will save the day (or at least your pictures…).  Actually several solution are possible but I like this one because it doesn’t involve having to remember backing up your data every so often (and you know how these failures ALWAYS happen right BEFORE you got to do the backup…) The solution is called a RAID drive.  RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks.  (If you want to know more about the technical aspect of this type of drive system see this article.)  Setting up a RAID 1 drive is relatively simple and involves purchasing a RAID controller (if your PC’s motherboard doesn’t already have one) and a second (identical in size) hard drive to the one you are presently using on your PC.  If you are completely computer illiterate when it comes to setting up computer hardware I’m sure you have someone in your entourage that can help you in setting up a RAID 1 array.

What this second drive does is to introduce redundancy in the critical component of your photo storage scheme (that’s the engineer in me talking…). You now have two drives mirroring each other i.e. they are exact copies of each other. And this mirroring is going on constantly so you don’t have to be thinking of backups all the time.  To your PC the Raid 1 drive looks like only one drive but in reality it’s a set of two identical drives.  Your system is now much more robust, in fact you could pull out one of the two drives at any time and your PC would still keep running.  Therefore in the above scenario where you loose a drive to some sort of hardware failure the RAID controller will simply advise you that you have lost data redundancy and that you should repair the defective drive (which you should do as quickly as possible…)

A RAID drive also introduces other possibilities for even further protecting your pictures and making your PC even more robust but I’ll get into that in a later post…

That was the first week…

The following week I moved on to Maryland with the three girls.  We spent a few nights on Assateague Island.  This place is great if you don’t mind the the lack of commodities.  And the island is populated by herds of wild ponies (though they’re more the size of horses…)  Plenty of great shots here.  The best ones where taken early in the morning or late in the afternoon given that the mid-day sun was really too bright for good picture taking.  Here is the album with my best photographs taken on the island.  

Only drawback in this little island paradise is the horse… flies!  I think they are capable of stinging through a horse’s thick leather skin so you can image that they had a feast of me with my not so thick skin…

I also made it to New York City for a few days but I’ll tell you about it in one of my next posts…