When my iBook crashed a couple of week ago it had been a solid two months since I did a “real” back up. I wasn’t really worried since a lot of my documents and such are stored in the “cloud” as they call it. My main concern was for the photos I had taken and stored on the hard drive. I’m pretty good at backing up my images, comparatively. When I do back up my photos they are backed up to two duplicate hard drives and I burn two duplicate DVDs which are usually stored in two different locations. But what about November? I hadn’t done my usual back up routine and I was missing all of November. Oh and October too. Halloween with the kids, making caramel apples and trips to the great-grandparents. All sorts of things.

Fortunately I shoot everything in RAW and JPG on my cameras. And when you shoot RAW image files they eat up a bunch of space. In fact my old iBook was so full of other stuff I had to save my RAWS to a removable hard drive almost after every shoot, else I would be out of space in a jiffy. In fact I created an Automator action that would copy the RAWS to the hard drive almost automatically. Then, if you are interested, I use software called Big Mean Folder Machine to create put those files in to folders just the right size to burn a DVD of.

And so thanks to my iBook’s Hard Drive impotence I had a RAW backup of every image I shot from early October to the beginning of December.