While the WordPress team are busy encouraging us to write/post more with either words or photos, I am having the ‘glitch’ of the year. I didn’t manage to post anything for the past month, I am having a pause from the blogging season. I’ll be lying if I said I had nothing to write about; as a matter of fact I haven’t finished organizing my blog the way I want people to read it and I still have dozens of images to post as well. I know my excuses are very lame as I said I went for a holiday; a family holiday that involved me with routine domestic activities that although it’s exciting but so different and irrelevant to the travel theme of this blog. To go back to the blogging routine after almost 2 weeks holiday is another story….
My other excuse and this is the real one is that I lost most of the important photos from my visit to Iran last May. Which is why I haven’t fulfilled my promise to post my story about the magnificent mosques in Iran, as there was no supporting pictures for that post.
♦ ♦ ♦
It was a month ago that I lost my photography files and yes, I managed to recover most of my pictures, Yet that incident taught me to do something that I should have done a long time ago, to back up my files! Writing blogs maybe nothing to do with picture collections, but in my case that is everything, this is how I write my stories, based of the pictures I took. On the other hand to me those pictures are priceless, as they come from places that I might not be able to visit again. Photographs about Lion Pride, I took on my safari holiday in Kenya, I may not be able to capture those two lions fighting again. Or photographs I took in Syria, which is all history now; one would never see these countries the same way again.
With those things in mind, I need to look for a solution for my files: to store them properly and to back them up. I know most of you are not big photography based bloggers, but I also know that many of you are either an amateur photographer or even a photography enthusiast, who have thousands of photography files, either personal photos or photos to support your blog and good enough to show them off in your photoblog. Nowadays with a DSLR camera you can fill up your computer storage very quickly and before long you’ll need an external storage. This is my situation:
- I have spent 1 x 350GB + 2 x 500GB + 2 x 1TB and 1 x 2TB of external drive just to store my photos and a little bit of everything (less than 200GB) file, and still counting.
- We will leave Qatar and be homeless in 6 month time (traveling for 2 years with no particular home base), thus I’ll be relying on my digital files big time, and yet I don’t want to carry those things with me.
- I need back up for all my files that are accessible from where ever I will be.
After several days of browsing on the net and a discussion with my colleague in the office, and another discussion with another person, there are some solutions:
The consep of MyCloud – as ilustrated by http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk
- Use Cloud Storage so that I can access it from anywhere and from any computer. There are several ‘providers’ that give this type of service, the very popular dropbox or google-drive, or skydrive and many other (you can see more alternative of this kind of services here). The problem is I am not a normal person who has a normal size storage; my storage would be “rather” big. Besides, thats not including back up.
- There’s this thing called Backblaze or Crashplan etc, which services are to back up your files (there are more alternatives of this service as well). But I still need a storage on top of that…. besides, the fact that I don’t like to have my files out there, without me being able to control them….
- Another option which I think is a brilliant solution is using storage system called NAS system. I don’t think this is a new system, but this is new knowledge for some low tech person like me. First instance, this is brilliant! it’s like I have my own server as my own storage, I control it (not in the cloud), it can store my stuff from my computer as well as my husband’s computer and I can expand it as much as I want without re-arranging/sync the file every time I expand or change computer… So if I think ahead, this system could still be good once we settle down (that is in 2 years time). Bonus of this new NAS system is that I can access it from anywhere in the world; it’s like cloud storage, but this is my own personal cloud!
the ideal system as illustrated by QNAP
OK, after more than 2 weeks of thinking, discussions and researching of which type and brand of NAS External Driver to buy, I decided to buy the brand that has “myCloud” system…. honestly, I never decided to buy a new ‘toy’ this quick. Normally my process of buying sophisticated gadgets took months. But because in 6 months time I’ll be on the road and have no income, I guess this is part of my digital packing system, all digital stuff I will pack it in the cloud, and be ready to go.
I am still struggling with my little external drive and my files are still scattered all over different USB drives
But there’s this technical question, which I am struggling with ever since I’ve got that device 3 weeks ago, and haven’t got the wiz to make it up and running. I am still struggling with my little external drives and my files are still scattered all over different USB drives… I am still in PAUSE MODE from blogging. Anybody can help so that I can focus back to my blogging instead of technology crap???