After a rework of my site using the lovely “Beachland” WordPress theme shown here, I’ve added my own header photo the banner at the top of the page. This was part of a much larger image and is of Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight, taken on a day’s walk in August 2006.
Afton Down, shown in the background with the path running up it’s spine, holds a special place in my affection. Back in 1970, I attended the second of the great Isle of Wight Festivals and the fields off tothe left of the Down was the site for it. It now seems that the Festival was particularly remembered for sex and drugs. I now want a partial refund as all I had was some superb music – the sex and drgs missed me! However, I did enjoy bands such as The Who, Free, Moody Blues, Edgar Broughton, Melanie, Joni Mitchell, Hawkwind, Emerson, Lake and Palmer (a major influence in my love of popular classical music) and one of the last performances of the late Jimi Hendrix- all fabulous!
Alas, our (illegal) camp site was on the beautiful Down itself and I have to remonstrate with myself for creating such mess and chaos! Luckliy, it soon recovered!
Ever mindful of the no. of images that I now have stored, I’m been looking to do something different in terms of storage and backup. I have a collection of external USB disk drives consisting of 1 x 80Gb, 1x 120Gb, 2 x 300Gb and a 500Gb.
To be honest, my data management has been poor and until recently, I’ve paid scant regard to backing up apart from occasionally copying a new shoot to DVD as well before I do anything with the images. I also use SyncToy, a free file synchronisation tool from Microsoft.
Tonight, I’m living on the edge and am now using a Network Attached Storage device (NAS) from Raidsonic which uses 2 SATA disks in one box which can either be configured as 2 JOBDs (“Just a Bunch of Disks”) or as a RAID (“Random Array of Inexpensive Disks”). The RAID can be configured in several ways, one of which (RAID 1), effectively uses two disks which exactly mirror each other without any human interaction. So if (or rather when!) one disk fails, the otehr contains an exact copy, thus providing greater security. The NAS uses a spare network port on the router and, once set up, it just looks like any other drive with its own drive letter.
The NAS has two USB ports for attaching flash drives, other USB drives etc and has a single button which will copy whatever is on the attached USB device to the disk/s. The other port can also be used to has a USB printer attached so you could print from any other PC on the network (I’ve got a desktop PC which I use for most tasks, my own laptop and the Mad House laptop for when I’m working at home.
I can also use the NAS as a Internet server but yet to try that! All this is making my brain ache but I’m getting there!
Raidsonic website
