It's that time again - Backing up my files.

Screen shot of my desktop computer - backing up my 2024 files

I am a big supporter of backups.  Not the type in a car where the reverse lights come on and where large trucks make regular beeping sounds.  Rather, the backups I am referring to are those of important files on my computer.

I try to do this once a year.  I have 5 hard drives on my main computer.  My C: drive has my programs, OS, and Windows on it.  It is a SSD, or Solid State Drive, where there are no moving parts and it allows me to boot in seconds.  I don't keep any docs or images on it other than what is needed by the system.

The second hard drive (D:) is used to put recent stuff.  Right now all I have on it is my 2025 stuff.  Everything else has been moved to my main hard drive, a 5 tb (terabyte) monster that has every digital image I have ever taken on it and all my other documents to boot.  This includes my power point images, books I have written, and even files from school.

The fourth and fifth hard drives I use to back up all the stuff on the one I just mentioned.  They are both 2 tb drives and I split the material between them.  They are there just for redundancy.

Now, as if that is not enough, I have two external drives, both 5 tb, that I store everything on.  One I keep in the house and the other I keep off site.

This may seem insane, but I know everything I have shot is safe and available.  And the good news is that it is not very expensive.  I just bought a 4 tb backup drive for $125 from Amazon.  Interestingly enough, you can get up to 24 tb from what I saw, and I'm sure you can do even better than that.  If you really want to go the distance you can stack several hard drives together and set them up as a RAID that acts as a single drive.

It takes me about half a day to do this.  When I am done, it gets left for another year.  Guess what I will be doing about this time in 2026?

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com


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