Computers and Photography

Hi. Ken Erickson here. I'm an old hand at computers and photography, as well as software engineering, and working on all the stuff that makes the web possible. But, until now, I was never too interested in the "content" or stuff that was actually on the web.

As it turns out, the content is really a lot more interesting that the nuts and bolts of the web itself (unless you are a web designer, I guess).

This blog is an attempt to share many years of experience in troubleshooting and repairing home computers as well as helping photographers make the transition from film to digital (while producing very high quality output).

I have over 27 years of experience in commercial data processing, computer operations, and systems and applications programming. As home or small business computers get more powerful and have more storage, they can now easily surpass the capabilities and capacities of many of the room-sized computers I started out working on.

This is both good and bad. Good, because the cost keeps getting cheaper, but bad because the more you store on your computer, and the more you rely on it for everything, the greater chance there will be for a catastrophic failure that causes you to lose some or all your data.

Backup, Backup, Backup

So, before talking too much about how to troubleshoot or repair broken computers, lets take a minute and try to give ourselves the best chance of surviving problems by being prepared.

Step 1 - Be sure your computer(s) and associated peripherals are plugged into high quality surge suppressors. They don't need to be battery backup systems (unless you have a lot of extra money).

Step 2 - Be sure you have good regular backups of all your disks. What you back up is dependent on how your system is laid out, but at a minimum you should have an exact copy of your system drive that's less than a week old (newer if your system is very heavily used). Back up your data at whatever frequency works for you. If it doesn't change much then perhaps weekly is fine. If it changes a lot, then probably nightly (or more often) is better. I can't stress enough how much time good backups will save you when you have a system problem. You only need to lose everything once to believe me.

Since we are talking about backups, I should probably mention a few methods. First, if you have a newer Macintosh system (highly recommended), a large (500 GB - 1 TB) external drive dedicated to MacOSX Time Machine is pretty much as simple as it gets, and it will save you 99.99% of the time. If you are really a fanatic, you can also use a program like SuperDuper to make a clone of your startup disk on another spare disk, and then you're really covered.

On the PC/Windows side, it's not quite as simple, and there are a lot more choices, but what you should be looking for is something that will backup whatever disks or directories you select to either another drive or some other media, such as tape, CD-R, or DVD-R. The principles are exactly the same - you want a full copy of your data that you can recover in the event one or more of your hard disks crashes.

Regardless of whether you use PC or Mac, having good backups (preferably on disks) is the most effective way to go.

In my next post, I'll present some suggestions on how to segregate your active data from the computer's operating system files, so it's easier to just back up the things that change. The faster and easier backups are, the more likely they are to get done.