Well dudes, this week the cat basket had a visitor.


This visitor smashed his way into the building using a garden bench as a battering ram to take down the back door.


Nice area, random hit. This time the odds were not in my favour.


Burglar alarm meant that they stayed in the place for just a few minutes. They raided one room, a bedroom. They missed my several Macs that were in other rooms.


Now to my word of caution. My desktop iMac is backed up twice. Once as a clone and once using time machine. (Super Duper and Apples own).

BUT! both backups sit next to the iMac. I could have lost A LOT of data. My photos, videos, accounts and much much more.


So at the very least guys, put your backup disk out of sight, so that if the men with masks and sacks with "swag" written on them do visit then they will miss your backup data.

CC

Sorry to hear that. Honestly, some 'people' are b@st@rds.

Sorry to hear about this.

One of the other forumites normally harps on about keeping backups off site. Sensible advice.

How awful.

Sorry to hear about that CC, hope you can get your house feeling safe again soon, I know how it can shake you up, but it's temporary.

That reminds me to sort out my insurance. I hope you get everything sorted out okay.

Damn. Sorry to hear it CC, hope you're all ok.

+1, and I'm angry just thinking about it

Should I ditto this?

It could be worse.

Insurance should take care of the damage and my computer life is all intact.


I am thinking of chaining my iMac to the wall now. It would not be visible from my work position. I don't feel too unsafe or even too cross, but I have realised that losing both my computer and backups would upset me rather a lot.

So my external HDDs are now hidden from sight and the pondering over chaining my iMac to the wall has begun. There is a nice hole at the back of the stand that would facilitate such an arangement. I think a Kensington lock would somehow not be enough.

Thankfully I've never been burgled (yet!), but I imagine it must be a pretty horrifying experience. You have my sympathies CC!

As for backing up - this is why I use the cloud (Google Drive and Skydrive).

Sorry to hear that CC.

Have a look at Carbonite.com, offsite backup which costs around $5 a month. I had it on my iMac, worked great until I started using Apeture, then it stuck at always having 90GB to backup every time I added new photos to the collection, but for everything else it was great.

Now I'm using Lightroom, which doesn't create a huge database instead of storing individual files, it works much better.

I feel for you CC. It sucks that some people are so selfish as to do this to others, and in contrast it's just like you to think of helping others at such a hurtful time. Thank you!

I have multiple backups, although like most people my system is very far from perfect. My signature on the old place used to read "Did you back up tonight, or isn't your data that important?" and the truth is, no. Most of my data simply isn't that important.

My most important data is backed up on-line, in addition to being stored on multiple devices around the house. That's things like "precious memories" photographs where I would be genuinely upset if I lost them. These days you get many gigs of on-line storage for free, and in fact I think I got my Dropbox from your link! I also the free offerings from Google, Microsoft and Box. In the early days, I simply emailed them to myself.

Big Things like DVD rips I only have 2 copies on site, and both copies are physically in one box. It would only cost me my time to re-rip them all, and technically I guess I wouldn't own them any more if the originals were stolen anyway... if indeed you could even say I owned them in the first place!

Of course the situation is very different for those folks who take photography more seriously than I do, or have other creative pastimes involving big data. I think your suggestion of stashing a backup archive somewhere well out of site is an excellent one. You can get huge capacity drives for less than £100 now, which might turn out to be the best investment. You could also archive off-site every so often by simply swapping drives with a like-minded friend.

Remember folks, nothing is certain in life except for death, tax and hard drive failure. Somewhere there is drive dying right now, and someone is posting on a forum "OMG you have to help me, my important data is gone!"

I'm sorry to hear about your woes, CC. It's the violation of your personal space that hurts the most, I think. Stuff can be replaced, but you never quite feel clean after you someone you don't know has been rummaging through you private world.



You did know Aperture can also handle managed files like Lightroom, yes?

Something to think about. My NAS box with all my backups is right next to the TV.
I can't really move it as it has to be wired into the network and that's where my router is because that's where the phone line comes into the house.