Protecting What is Near and Dear to my Wife, Her Pictures.

If there is one thing that my wife is, it’s a picture fanatic. She literally takes hundreds of pictures a month! If you don’t believe me, ask my family, friends, and Facebook contacts.

My job of course is to keep these pictures safe! This job is considerably harder though because she stores her pictures everywhere. I can never seem to figure out why it’s such a hard concept to simply store all pictures in one place, the most obvious place, being the My Pictures folder.

Keeping pictures stored everywhere on a computer makes my backup job a littler harder, but there are a few different ways I can go about getting this done.

I could backup the entire PC, including files I don’t need to protect. This strategy is pretty simple but the consequences are high. Most users would avoid backing up the whole computer just to capture the images for the following reasons:

– Bandwidth is being used backing up things you don’t need.
– Extra offsite storage space is needed, and hence the costs associated with storing so much data, is high.
– Backup time is longer.
– Restoration becomes difficult since the pictures are still hidden like a needle in a haystack.
– Restoration time is longer.

I could also spend hours manually selecting all of the picture folders. But this method is prone to problems because:

– It is a waste of my time.
– I will probably end up forgetting some locations.

– It won’t backup newly added files my wife adds at a later date. There is a better way than the full PC backup though. The answer is a technology included in ROBOBAK called Smart Crawl Template Backup. Smart Crawl Template backup utilizes file type template search to selectively find what to backup based on the type of the file. Think of it like an automatic picture search engine for backup. Template backups don’t end at pictures though; common patterns include office documents, music, and source code to name a few. Each template can be applied to backup:

– All files matching the template.
– All files except for the files matching the template.The best part about these Smart Crawl Template Backups is that you can specify a Template at the entire network level, effectively backing up all computers no matter which computer my wife happens to be on when she’s downloading her photos!