Back Up Your Media - LaCie Drives

Backing up is the key to a secure media library. We cannot stress how important it is to your workflow, or daily life, to do a routine back up system. Whether you are a professional creating video and photo media, or a teenager just taking snaps with friends, if you don’t have back up of your media you will seriously be upset when your drive crashes. Ohhh, yes, at some point it will……

At Spencer Gordon Studios we buy two identical LaCie 1 TB drives. Why only 1 TB in size, because we don’t want to put a lot of our eggs into one basket. Keeping your drive size down obviously limits the amount of media that can potentially be lost or corrupted. Next we name our drives, for instance, in the photo above the two vertical drives on the right are named DuWop and DuWop Copy. The black LaCie drives on the left are named Digit and Digit Copy. We specifically name the drives that way for back up purposes. Giving them a name with “Copy” attached to it let’s us know that this is the mate of the working drive, by the way Digit Copy is going into retirement this week, we’ll explain that in a moment.

SilverKeeper is the LaCie back up program that is simple to use. After you create the “Back Up Sets” in the program and the scheduling of the sets, that's it, you're ready. We back up everyday in our studio, at 5pm our SilverKeeper program kicks in and starts to back up the days work from DuWop to DuWop Copy. Effective, mindless, and no extra work on your end.

As we mentioned before, Digit Copy is retiring this week. What that means is Digit and Digit Copy are nearly full. Digit Copy is being packed up all comfy and put into long term storage off site. Off site? Digit Copy is staying at my sister’s house if you must know. It is always best to store your long term back up away from the original. Fire, flood, wild party, you never know, just make sure the Copy drive is somewhere else safe.

TIP: Don’t fill a drive completely. Good rule of thumb is to leave 600mb – 1gb of free space on the drive. Why? Sometimes a drive can potentially lose / corrupt information if the drive is filled to the max.