Don't forget that the next Digital Photo SIG meeting will be at 6:30
p.m. on Thursday, January 19, 2005. Rick Santich, owner of the
Shaker Heights Motophoto Portrait Studio will present the
Fundamentals of Digital Photography. Rick is an avid photographer
and has spoken and exhibited his work in a number of locations
throughout the region. The January meeting will be held at the Maple
Heights Branch of the Cuyahoga County Library. See the website for
directions (www.digitalphotosig.org)

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The Jewish Community Center is now accepting photographs for the Annual Jewish
Community Center Photography show, chaired by Herbert Ascherman. Submissions
are due by February 27, 2006. The entry form can be found on our website in PDF
form: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalphoto-gcpcug/files/

For questions, please contact Deborah Dobrow using the information below:

Deborah L. Bobrow
Special Projects Coordinator
Jewish Community Center of Cleveland
26001 S. Woodland
Beachwood, OH 44122
phone: 216.593.6278 email: dbobrow@...

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It has been said by one observant film photographer who spoke to our
group that digital photographs are only as good as your backup
strategy. In the spirit of the new year, please revisit your backup
strategies. The summary below is from an excellent article from PC
Magazine that can be read in its entirety at the link below.

Backup Best Practices: Read This First!
08.17.05
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1847366,00.asp

By Robert P. Lipschutz
The terms we throw around in this story—incremental backup, system
versus data protection, single-file restore, and disaster recovery—
may make the whole idea seem daunting. But backing up your data
(documents, photos, Quicken files, and such) is not an option; it's
a necessity. And we recommend you back up your OS and applications,
too, so you can recover from a disaster that wipes out or corrupts
your hard drive.

In truth, both the Home and the Professional editions of Windows XP
come with simple backup functionality. The problems are: No one
knows where to find it; it doesn't do single-file recovery; and the
Automatic System Recovery (ASR) available in Windows XP Pro requires
a floppy disk to use (many systems don't have floppy disk drives
anymore).


Here, we present our tips and recommendations to guide you in
setting up a backup plan that makes sense for your needs.

> Separate your data from your operating systems and applications.
Ideally, you should save data files on a separate drive or
partition. This will make protection easier in many ways, and it
could save your bacon. For example, you can restore your system to a
previous state without reversing your data to that point in time.
Our favorite partitioning tools are Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0
and Norton PartitionMagic 8.0.

> Purchase an external USB 2.0 hard drive for your backups. It's a
worthwhile investment that pays for itself with one system recovery.
Dedicate the drive to backup; don't use it for anything else.

> Distinguish between protecting your system (operating system,
settings, applications), so you can recover from a crash, and
protecting your data (documents, digital pictures, music, settings).
Some backup tools work better for system files; some work better for
data.

> Identify what you absolutely can't afford to lose—pictures of your
kids, financial information, and so on.

> Do you have the installation CDs for all your software? If not,
you need an image of your system and its dozens of applications.

> Store a duplicate of your most crucial data off-site, using DVDs,
an online service, or a second external drive.

> Schedule a full-system backup once a week and smaller, incremental
backups (that store only changes to files) daily or nightly.

> If you encounter file problems, the most recent backup of that
file may have the same problems. So don't be too quick to overwrite
older backups.

> As you learn the ropes, don't be afraid of mixing and matching for
better protection. Multiple solutions, such as continuous backup and
traditional backup, give you both quick recovery and long-term
protection.

> Storing backups on a separate partition of your hard drive (as
Norton GoBack does) makes them easily accessible but won't protect
you from a physical disaster. If you need this kind of protection,
keep a system backup off-site, either online, on an external drive,
or on optical media. We fit our Windows XP OS and a hoard of
applications (about 9GB total) on two DVDs.

> Note that most solutions can't restore individual e-mail messages,
because they see your whole mailbox as a single file. (As a
safeguard, make sure your e-mail accounts keep a copy of every
message on the server.)

> Typical consumer backup products don't save open files. So if you
never close your mail file, or you keep a status-report spreadsheet
open all the time, it may never get properly backed up.

> Test restores often. We've heard too many horror stories of
readers convinced that they were backing up properly only to find
that nothing was actually written to the disk.

The specific method you choose will depend on your appetite for
risk, your budget, and the value of your data based on time, real
dollars, and sentiment. Only you can choose the right solution. Here
are some combinations that we like:

> EMC's Retrospect with an external USB 2.0 hard drive and
secondary, off-site DVD storage gives you the best of most worlds—
data protection and system rollback.

> Norton Ghost for weekly or monthly system images—consider its new
incremental features for interim image creation, but make sure you
have a full image, not a baseline with incrementals, for a reliable
full-system recovery. If you want easy single-file access and
version storage, combine Ghost with a simple backup product like
Argentum.

> Online services are a good choice if you don't have a huge amount
of data to back up, as they can be incredibly slow.

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You are receiving this message because you are a member of a Yahoo
Group for the Digital Photography SIG, a Special Interest Group of
the Greater Cleveland PC User's Group. For more information on the
group or its
meetings, visit www.digitalphotosig.org.

If this email was forwarded to you by a friend and you would like to
join the mailing list, please visit www.digitalphotosig.org and
click on the "sign up" link.

Charles Burkett