During May's period of quiescence, I decided it was time to upgrade the trusty old home desktop system (built lovingly by my own hands back in ought-two) to the latest available version of OpenSUSE. I backed up /root, and /etc, and /home, ran the install, tweaked the wireless settings, restored the backed-up files, and was back in action in less than a day. (Having started messing with Linux back in the Slackware 1.0 days, when getting just about anything to work required substantial knowledge of your hardware, and getting things like a graphical interface to run required owner's manuals, careful study, and periods of fasting and repentance, the hardware detection abilities of modern Linux variants seem almost magic.[1])
A day or two later, the urge to blog began to reassert itself, spurred by an item of Alan Sullivan's which I can no longer find. It had something to do with the the "Newseum", Big Media's monument in celebration of itself. We walked past it several times on our recent D.C. foray, though never entered, and I was thinking about the museums we did visit, specifically the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport. It houses many, many air- and spacecraft, and I took a few pictures... let's see, I'll go find the uploaded pictures on disk, over in /usr/local/photos...
there followed that sinking sensation known to all computer users, when you realize you've done something you shouldn't have, and there's no way back. I'd never gotten around to burning the images to DVD, and when I installed the new OS, I reformatted and repartitioned the drive. Several hundred images, the total output of our trusty Canon A520? *Poof*. All gone. [2]
But! At least I uploaded about 200 of the images to Flickr, solely for the purpose of putting them up on this blog. So, even if it has accomplished nothing else in 3.5 years, this blog's existence has served to act as a partial safety net for my own stupidity...
It's a little bit late, but you may be interested in my practices.
I store all my data, including photos in sub-directories in my home directory, and back that up once a week. (So far it still fits on a DVD. I use Lightscribe DVDs for convenience in labeling.)
For a little extra protection (mostly from my own stupidity), I keep Linux on a separate hard disk from Windows. That disk is partitioned so as to allow spaces for three or four separate distros. When I decided to switch to Ubuntu, I did not remove my SuSE distro, I just installed Ubuntu in unused partitions. (And some time I will finish copying over my old email, which I am trying to figure out how to organize.)
So far -- knock on wood -- I haven't lost any significant data with those procedures.
Incidentally, I would interested in knowing why you chose SuSE. (I have used Fedora, SuSE, and now Ubuntu with some success.)
Posted by: Jim Miller on June 9, 2008 08:40 AM
You should pick up one of these. Similar devices are available from other manufacturers. I picked several up from the local Best Buy for $100 each, which is just fantastic. The "powered by USB" makes them so much easier to use, and the speed is decent (~20M / second write).
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy on June 9, 2008 05:17 PM
JM - I've been using some variant of SuSE for so long that I no longer remember why I chose that distro to begin with. I think it was a combination of the SysV init (which Slackware didn't have) and the gobs and gobs of included software (which Red Hat and Debian had less of) and that the local Fry's had copies on the shelf.
Lately, I have a more compelling reason in that the company I work for (which shall of course remain nameless) is now releasing Linux software (which shall also remain nameless), and we do all our building/testing on SuSE, because a big European customer dangled muchos Euros in front of us to do so.
Posted by: David Fleck on June 9, 2008 09:55 PM
I store photos in subdirectories named by date (e.g., "20080609"). It only recently occurred to me to create keyword files for each photo subdirectory, so that I can more easily find my valuable pineapple photos, for example. This seems like a good idea in that it takes little time to add keywords and my text files full of keywords are software-independent. Most (all?) of the specialized photo-cataloging programs seem to run on proprietary databases that lock you into one company's products if you succumb to the temptation to use their idiosyncratic keywording systems. If I became smart I could create a database to keep track of my keywords and the directories to which they point. Until then my ghetto cataloging system will suffice.
Posted by: Jonathan on June 9, 2008 10:42 PM
Shoulda stuck to film, sonny! Teee heee heee heee!
Seriously, an incident like that probably would've killed me.
I second the Annoying Old Guy's suggestion of an external hard drive. I have one for backups and so forth. It's come to where you can get a terabyte for about a buck and a half (well, not quite, but close).
Posted by: Angie Schultz on June 10, 2008 07:04 PM
At least two external hard drives, preferably rotated between locations. One backup isn't enough.
Posted by: Jonathan on June 10, 2008 08:47 PM
Jonathan;
If you use JPGs, you can store the keywords in the picture in a software independent manner. I would recommend looking for photo album software that does that (Photoshop and its variants do, and I think PaintShop Pro X2 does, and I am sure there are others). One of these days I am going to write something that takes keywords from the file name and puts them in the JPG data. Real Soon Now.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy on June 12, 2008 01:58 PM
Thanks, AOG. My files are a mix of JPGs and RAW. I try to avoid renaming or otherwise editing individual files because there are usually too many of them. Much easier for me to create a text file and type a bunch of relevant keywords into it. But to each his own. (BTW, Irfanview, which is freeware, works well for lossless editing of JPGs.)
Posted by: Jonathan on June 12, 2008 09:50 PM
J-
I store photos in subdirectories named by date (e.g., "20080609").
I'll admit that I just dumped all the image files into a few directories, based on not much of anything at all... all the raw images went in one directory, all the processed images went into another, and all the uploaded ones went into a third. Time to start afresh, I guess.
AOG-
do you mean the exif data? I'd never thought about that before, but I know there are Perl modules out there that allow you to manipulate a jpg's exif tags. No idea how robust they are, though.
Posted by: David Fleck on June 12, 2008 10:09 PM