Flickr in the Rear

I just converted my free Flickr account, into a Pro’ account. I’ve heard some nightmare stories from a couple of friends who’ve lost entire photo collections, years of memory-hints — gone — due to a single hard drive failure. These friends aren’t non-savvy idiots, they’re folks I respect for mutual geekiness. They just thought it wouldn’t happen to them, which is a very human attitude.

I do take precautions, and I used to backup to DVD, but alas, it’s a troublesome process, tedious, and not altogether reliable. Lately I’ve been rsync’ing data to an external USB drive, which is great for a one off snapshot, but not effective against slow data corruption or data-diddlin attacks. It’s mainly for convenience in the restoration of data that’s readily available elsewhere.

My photographs are probably the most important piece of data on my workstation, not my documents, personal correspondance, or any residual trace of on-line transactions. Just my memory-hints. Time for off-site back-ups, and Flickr is just the thing for the job. With some added social networking benefits to boot.

technorati tags: flickr, photography, photograph, backup, dvd, usb

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