Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
Solutions
Available backup solutions include tape, cloned hard drives, CDs/DVDs, hardware
RAID (multiple hard disks that can tolerate one or more of them going wrong), and
various online services. All these solutions require software to get the data from one type
of media to another, at a scheduled time or on demand. Here you have two options.
You can use the facilities provided in your operating system, or you can purchase software
that has been designed specifically for backup applications.
Microsoft Windows Vista and Apple’s OS X Leopard have improved backup hugely
for their respective brands. Apple, in particular, offered quite poor backup until the
introduction of Time Machine, which gives users the flexibility to select source and
destination, time of backup, and other important parameters. To create a local backup,
you need to connect a second non-booting hard drive to your computer. The operating
system takes care of the rest, backing up by default at midnight, unless you tell it
otherwise.
Yet even Time Machine was only a partial solution. Apple released an API (Application
Programming Interface) to third-party developers, expecting them to finish the job by
providing a comprehensive range of robust backup options. Third-party backup software
is rarely expensive, but it does a better job, more conveniently, than you can achieve
with the standard tools offered by your operating system.
If you are a professional photographer, the type of backup you need depends largely on
the size of your business and how it is organized. For example, do individual photographers
use their own workstations, or do they pool images into a large database? If people
work on their own, they may need a Personal Data Recovery (PDR) solution that
enables them to take a “snapshot” of their hard drive, writing the entire contents including
the operating system to another disk. This is where third-party software will always
be superior because it is independent of the operating system, enabling users to reboot
even when their OS is corrupted.
In the market there are a greater number of good backup solutions for PC than there
are for Macintosh. The proportion of entries does not reflect this imbalance, being
weighted in favor of Macintosh in recognition the fact that most photographers are
Mac-based. Using any one of these products can improve your level of protection significantly,
always with the proviso that backup copies must be kept at a separate physical
location to be truly effective.
Déjà Vu
Vendor: Propaganda Productions
Purpose: “Preference pane” in Mac System Preferences, for scheduled backup of important folders