I still manually back-up my digital work. We’ll see how long that lasts. There are plenty of noteworthy programs out there that I hear do a great job of doing this automatically.
So let’s take a look. The goal is to have two versions of everything that is still being worked on. One version is on an internal drive and the other is somewhere else (like an external HD or a different computer). Once projects are finished, or finished for the time being, they are back up to DVD.
Each DVD is marked by a number and has a brief description which is filed away into a warm case.
On my computer, there is one master document that lists the back-up DVDs by number and everything that is on them. The trick here is listing every filename and folder name that is on the DVD, printing the file structure. Then the back-ups can be searched like things are searched for when they are still on the computer.
Printing the file structure for a DVD or any other folder is simple. Using the Terminal program in Mac OS X, navigate to the base folder that you are interested in and type: ls -GR1
G: colorizes output, R: Recursively lists subdirectories, 1: Forces every entry to be one line.
The system reinforces good file naming and folder hierarchy from start to finish. Anybody else have a back-up strategy they’d like to share? Anybody that uses Time Machine want to chime in?
