By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Data Loss Two incidents in the past week have given me pause to think about this subject.

Server Failure A few days back I checked the neighborhood website I maintain, http://www.oldhydeparkfl.org, and was greeted by a message stating that maintenance was being performed and the site would again be available as soon as possible. When the message was still there after 12 hours, I sent an email to the web hosting company and received the following message.

They replaced that server but had no backup to restore to it, although they were sending the hard drives out for data recovery which could take over a week. Additionally, the three emails they supposedly sent to me never reached me--possibly getting lost in all the SPAM I receive. As with all my sites, I have an exact copy on my own computer (and backed up on CD) that I was able to republish to the replacement server. The only possible problem is that some of the neighborhood residents may have recently changed their password information online, and that data was lost with the online version of the membership database. Also, the statistics for the site reside on the drives that are at data recovery. This is the site where I posted flooding photos of the neighborhood which received a large amount of interest--22 GB of data transfer in one day. So those statistics were somewhat interesting.

Hard Drive Failure The second incident was the erratic behavior of one of my external USB hard drives. This was a 40 GB one made by Maxtor (model 3000 LE) that is several years old. I noticed a few weeks back that this drive would all of a sudden go into some sort of auto play mode where a window would pop up and the names of files would flash by real fast. Momentarily I would receive a request to configure what programs would handle certain file types. I always clicked cancel and everything was fine. Then occasionally, this drive, listed as drive F, would be missing from the My Computer listing. Unplugging one or both of the USB or power cords to the drive would fix this problem--up until this last time. No amount of disconnecting and reconnecting got the drive back. Fortunately I only used this drive as a backup drive, so nothing was lost. And the next day, although the drive was missing after I booted the computer, after several hours it went into this auto play thing, and I had it back. But it is certainly not to be trusted and will be retired. When this drive is having problems, the green light that indicates the drive is doing something blinks rapidly and you can hear clicking noises from inside the drive--not a good sign.

New External Drive Only a few days before all of this, I had bought a new Maxtor 160 GB external hard drive ($199) that supports both USB and FireWire connections. I wanted this as a backup for all the photos, negatives and slides I have scanned in over the years and for all the digital photos I have taken in more recent years. These photos are also backed up on CDs and DVDs, but they are much more accessible on this external hard drive.

This drive has something called One Touch Storage and Backup with a button for such on the front. That is, it does if you install the software that comes with the drive. Since I am only going to use this as storage for my photography efforts and possibly some other file backups like my programming and web sites, I have no need for the one touch thing. But for those who would like a complete backup of their main hard drive, this looks like the thing--and I might get another such drive just for that purpose. Not only can you do a selective backup of files, but also you can back up everything, including the operating system, computer settings, and your applications. This backup can then be used to restore your computer to its state before a hard drive failure or other disaster. This is accomplished with the Dantz Retrospect software provided on the CD.

Photo Database With all these photos now on a hard drive (and backed up to CD & DVD), I needed a way to efficiently give the photos descriptions and dates. A typical path for a photo is G:\HP PhotoScan\Black & White 1970's\1974\March\Scan928.tif.

First, I created an Access database to contain my photo information with fields such as year, month, path, and file name. Then using VB.Net, I wrote a program with two main parts. The first part allows me to select a folder containing photos and have all of the names of the files in the folder added to this database along with the year, month and folder path. This eliminates all typing except for entering descriptions as described below.

The second part of the program displays the database table containing this information. Here when I click on a record, the associated photo is then displayed. This allows me to easily enter a description of the photo. Of course, it is going to take me some time to create all of the descriptions, since there are about 5,700 photos alone in just the HP Photoscan folder’s sub folders. Then I have the photos scanned using my old HP flatbed scanner and my newer Epson Perfection 3200 photo scanner. Then there are all the digital photos I have taken and then all the slides and negatives I have not yet scanned.

When I am finished, if I want a photo with a bird in it, all I have to do is search the database table. This should produce all photos with the word bird in the description. Similarly, and more importantly, I could search for a particular individual.

When I do finally get most of my non-digital photos on the computer along with all the ones taken in recent years with a digital camera, how do I protect and preserve these photos? As I noted earlier, computers can be totally destroyed or their hard drives can simply fail to function. My protection scheme at present is to have every photo on two different hard drives--preferably on two different computers and to have at least one CD or DVD backup of each image, then after several years make new CD or DVD backups and also put the photos on still newer hard drives or whatever new storage media may come out. u