1TB The New Floppy

I recently added a new addition to the back up arsenel. Its a 1 Tetra Byte Seagate goflex portable hard drive.

Its about the size of the small external floppy drives that we used to use with computers in the 90's. When macs came out they revolutionized the industry with a hard plastic shuttered floppy made by Sony. Computer enthusiasts would spend hours pushing in the floppy and pulling out the floppy as it wrote to this external disk of 400k. They started out at 10 dollars each. We cheered as the price went down and they became double sided. We even didn't have to turn them over. Imagine that!

Flash to the present. The new floppy is a on TB on a go flex. They sell for about 100 dollars at all the major stores from Target to Best Buy. They do not need a separate power source. They use the the power from the USB port to drive the backup. My what back up. I bought the Seagate version. It is easy to but on your Mac Network and dump off all the data and photos you need. When done, you take the hard drive to the trash. Then unplug it from the USB and store it away. It does not need to be up and running on your network at all times. Pretty cool.

It is true that you really need at least 3 back ups of all your original work. I have two hard drives on my network as well as a personal cloud network away from the usual attachments.

My latest project... well its taken over 8 months.. is a watercolor depiction of our little kitten's life an adjustment to the Merced home. It is painted in an extreme formatted East Indian paper watercolor book of watercolor paper that absorbs watercolor paints like crazy. The current page count  is 47. I think I will ended it at 49 or 50. Each page has been scanned and straightened in photoshop. I am pretty excited that it is almost done.  I think that last page will be a family portrait with Oliver in the middle. He has to share the spotlight with the two other older cats.

This 1 TB portable hard drive is the last piece of mind I have in making sure that the pages of Oliver the Kitten survive. Cammie and Mikie think that it might make a great e-book. 

It seems a little ironic that we were backing up our tiny files that we thought were so precious so many years ago, yet now many people that push so many pixels around the screen fail to back up to a couple of spots. Save those family photos in at least three places.

Take it from one with experience in these matters... hard drives fail. Don't let them be the end of your work!  I am just saying..... : ) Pat