Well, with the holidays finally here and gone, many of us are left with fond memories of the past year and, depending on how avid a photo-taker or videographer you are, you’ve accumulated a ton of pictures and video of family, friends, vacations, pets, parties and the like. Now is a perfect time to check your data backup plan and to make sure that if your hard drive fails, you don’t lose all those memories.
While having a working hard drive backup is great, there is an even better way when it comes to digital media. Make yourself a hard copy of your photo and video libraries from time to time. I’m talking about burning those files to Blu-Ray, DVD, or CD depending on the size of your collection, the physical size of your photos and videos, and how long it’s been since your last hard-copy backup.
With all your memories backed up this way, you’ll be sure to have them in the future. Not every backup plan is foolproof – so the more ways you back up, the better. A few years ago my backup plan included cloning the hard drive in my laptop and keeping a copy on an external drive. That way I’d have a perfect copy of everything on my computer. I was performing the cloning function and writing over the backup drive when the hard drive in my laptop physically failed. I lost everything on both drives – the main drive failing corrupted the data on the drive I was backing up to.
My only saving grace was that I had just about everything that was most important to me burned to CDs. It took a while to install a new drive, reinstall the operating system and move everything back over from CD – mainly because there were so many of them. Had I had copies on DVD, or better yet, Blu-Ray it would have gone much quicker.
Last month, OWC introduced the 12x “Quad Interface” Mercury Pro Blu-ray External Drives, which is ideal for backing up large amounts of video, photos, music, or any other data files Blu-ray is capable of burning up to 50GB of data onto a single Blu-ray disc in 15 to 20 minutes. That’s equal to 50,000 JPEG images, 17,500 MP3 songs, 25 DVD quality movies, or just under four hours of High Definition video! The Mercury Pro Blu-ray drives also read and/or write virtually all types of optical media, including DVD R/RW & Dual-Layer, DVD-RAM, and CD-R/RW.
Its the perfect device for making that New Year’s Resolution to make sure your data is kept safe and secure.
