Aperture

When Aperture was released I picked up a copy and instantly loved it. I had been wanting something like it for years. After installing Aperture I didn't use Photoshop nearly as much. Everything goes through Aperture first. Now that Aperture is $80 bucks, every purchaser of a new camera should pick up a copy. Head on over to the Mac App Store and pick up your own copy, I highly recommend it.

Backups and Archiving

In the last few days left of 2010 we reviewed the business expenses and what we needed and decided to enhance our back up strategy. The picture above is a photo of four 2TB g-drives we purchased to accomplish part of this. It is always good to review one's backup and archiving strategy and continue to improve upon it.

There are two rules to live by when it comes to backup:

1. The best backup is the one that you do.
2. You don't have a backup strategy if you don't test that it works.

The backup strategy must be simple and easy. RAID is great but it is not a backup.

Our backup solution is pretty simple. We run MacPros with every slot loaded with drives. The main drive is backed up every two weeks to a complete duplicate using Carbon Copy Cloner (we used to use Super Duper but ran into a few problems with it) and automatically with Time Machine. Two more drives store the data and are in a RAID 1, with a Time Machine backup and two of these g-drives are for complete offsite duplication.

Archiving happens in two ways. We make copies of all outgoing disks and two complete copies to external hard drives. One is offsite and one is onsite.

We also use an online service for redundant offsite storage and for delivery.