At the start of 2020 I made a resolution that this year my photography would focus on capturing everyday place in a way that has not been seen before, including places that I have never been before and places I did have enough time to do justice to the shoot. That included taking a weekend trip to the Mohawk Valley of NY to photograph fall foliage, a week trip to NYC to capture the foliage there, and some of the other state park in New York, beside Letchworth. TO say this was one resolution I did not keep is an understatement!

This late summer and early fall, I was able to get to Allegany State park in southern NY for the first time. The colors were near peak, but it still was a different place and I was able to get a great shot of the Kelly Wooden Bridge and the typical winding road shot.  I also spent time at Sodus Point and Chimney Bluff NY to capture both sunrises and sunsets, though they were not very different than what you find on the web. Reluctantly I went to Letchworth for a couple of sunrises. Again colors were near peak, but I did find a new spot that I had not photographed before so that was good. However as the season progressed and the colors reach peak, every photographer that I followed on social media, had the same shots of Letchworth, from the same freaking spots, and to be honest there was very little originality in 99.9% of them.  No imagination,No story to be told,  just typical shots of High Falls, Inspiration Point and Archer point. Between seeing what other have done, the fact that I was to be in NYC for my birthday fall shoot and bad weather, I gave up on anymore fall foliage shots.

Since I started with my Photography, it was a way to separate from my full time job.  I would always say that a bad weekend at a craft show was better than a good day at work. It was to be the fun thing I did when I retired, a way to make some extra money, but not meant to be another full time job. I like to visit place for other reason than just to get more pictures to sell, but to explore and this year there seemed to be a lot of pressure to go out and shoot. There is enough crap to deal with this year, so I stopped taking pictures this fall.

In every hobby there comes a time where you need to take a break, and the fall of 2020 is mine. Since the beginning of the fall I have been working on getting my Pet Portrait business started again, learning how to sell on Etsy and improve my presence on Social Media. I have always want to do some stop action photos, and I plan on doing some that over the next few month. In fact I plan on documenting my progress on this blog. After the first of the year I will start my yearly process of reviewing all my show photos, removing those that have had no sales, or I have better shots, add new photo, and prepare for the possibility of having a full show season.

So come fall of  2021 I will pull myself up by my bootstrap, hope I can travel more than 3 hours from Rochester and get back into landscapes and cityscapes photography.  However for now I will sit on the sidelines and let the other shoot the same old stuff.

Why should I be concerned about my backing my Photos and other important documents?

Image you have been taking pictures with your iPhone for years and all of a sudden you either loose the phone or the phone dies.  You may have been backing them up to iCloud, but you exceeded the 5GB limit and they no longer are being backup up. You just lost years of photos and memories.

You have all your financial information on your desktop/laptop and one day you cannot boot the computer.   Your local geek then tells you that your hard drive failed and it cannot be recovered.

Well how long will a hard drive last?

 Well if you have a traditional Hard Drive, which you usually find on Desktops and some cheap laptops. These drive have moving parts that will fail over time.  How long, on average about 80% of these drives will last 4 years. But if they are a lower price drive, that could drop down to 2-3 years.

If you have a Solid State Drive or a Flash Drive, while they do not have moving parts they still can fail.  Most of these drive come with a 3 – 5 year warranty and could have a life beyond that.  But they are electronic and electronics can fail without warning.

So what should I be doing now?

The rule of thumb for computer is the 3-2-1.  The 3-2-1 backup rule is an easy-to-remember acronym for a common approach to keeping your data safe in almost any failure scenario. The rule is: keep at least three (3) copies of your data, and store two (2) backup copies on different storage media, with one (1) of them located offsite

Why do I need a backup offsite?

Offsite backups serve to protect us from the imperfections of the world around us. They help us in preserving our physical and technical storage space, give us protection against a complete system crash or hardware failure, and help us regain our data in the event of a breach.  It also means that you can recover you data no matter where you are when disaster strikes. 

So what are my 2 local backups?

Well the first one can be your phone or computer hard drive.  Now you may not think of this as a backup, but it is the main storage for any of your data. They not only contain all of you data, photos, financial, etc. but also it hold the operating system for the device, IOS for Mac and IPhone users Windows10 or Android as examples. It also contains all the program files that you need to run an application, camera, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

The second backup can be any external device that is connected to you main device. For desktops/laptops you can purchase an external USB hard drives that hooks up to the computer. You can purchase a 2TB drive for less than $100.  For phones, you can use the same hard drive that you use for a desktop/laptop with a special cable that converts your phone plug to the USB. Average cost for this is around $20.

OK, so how do I do an offsite backup?

Well this is very easy as you can do this in different way. Some people may think of offsite as storing the backup on the cloud.  While that is the ultimate in offsite backups, it is not requires.  When you create you external backup  like above, you add an additional external drive and make a second copy of the data. You then take that second external drive and move it someplace away from you location.  That could be bring it to your office, bring it to a family member, store it with a trusted neighbor/friend or put it in waterproof safe and bury it in the back yard. (Ok that last one may be impractical, but you get the message).

So what programs do I use to make these backups?

If you are using an Apple device, there is a program called Time Machine. Time Machine works whenever the Mac is on. With Time Machine, your Mac keeps hourly backups for the previous 24 hours, daily backups for the previous month, and weekly backups for all previous months, until the Time Machine disk is full. ... Time Machine works with external hard drives.

For Windows devices you have Windows Backup that comes with Windows10.  While not the best backup program, it is easy to use and comes with Windows.  There are also many backup programs that can be added to Windows that give you more features. Additionally there are programs that will back up your data not only to an external device but also to the cloud.  These programs can run anywhere from free to a couple hundred dollars a year.

Final Thoughts

Now if you decide not to backup any data, just keep this in mind.  There are companies that will try to recover any lost data on a hard drive.  Expect to pay between $500and up for an attempt.  I say attempt in that they may not be able to recover everything.  Mac books could be a little cheaper, but still in the $500 to $1500 range.