Los Angeles Digital Imaging Group Blog

Now, before you embark on any change in your computer set up you should backup all your data. So, this was my next step. Being an astrology buff ( a consequence of my research into the Tarot for my project to create a Tarot card deck) I realized that we have entered into a Mercury retrograde cycle. This is when the planet Mercury appears to move backward from its normal motion in the sky – this happens rather frequently as Mercury is the closest planet to the sun and moves much faster then the earth. Astrology tells us that Mercury rules communication, computers and technology – when it is “retrograde” things often don’t go as smoothly because Mercury forces us to re-evaluate and re-group before we can move forward again… sounds like the perfect time to BACKUP everything!!!

The first order of business – backup my image archive. Now, this is something that I do every day but my cycling, off-site backup was more than a week out of date so I took the opportunity to do a new complete backup to the 3rd hard drive, a one terrabyte Seagate Barracuda. After 4 hours, everything was good… 3 copies  ready to go… restart computer and… Main Archive drive disappears!! Mercury wasn’t done with me yet. Repair the disk with Disk Utility, everything looks OK… so I restore from the backup (this is why you do backups) – another 4 hours and I’m good to go again.

While all this is going on I have been going though the many hard drives attached to my computer and consolidating data. I have a lot of temporary project files strewn across multiple hard drives, most of which are 250 gigs or less in size. I decided that I would re-organize everything, remove duplicate files, etc… and consolidate everything onto one  1-terrabyte drive. In the process of doing this I somehow deleted my iTunes library, which was stored on one of the external  drives. Ouch ! 6000 songs evaporate!!! Mercury retrograde strikes again… but its OK I have everything on my iPod – all of this is forcing me to exercise my backup and restore techniques, dust off unused contingency plans and get familiar with them. I actually had to download some 3rd party software to restore the library from the iPod… something I had never done before.

So all this extra work could be seen as just a royal pain in the ass OR… as a lesson from our celestial friend Mercury – take time to really learn how your backups work, make sure you KNOW how to recover from a disaster. Make sure you’ve secured ALL your data, even something as trivial as your iTunes library. I got a little extra practice over the weekend before last and I count this as a good thing! I maintain an exact boot-able duplicate of my internal startup drive – backed up once a week. This way, should disaster strike, I can simply re-start off the backup and be up and running in minutes. I have 3 duplicate copies of my main Image Archive, one of which is a Drobo redundant RAID and one of which cycles off site once a week. Off site for me is out of my converted garage office in a firebox in my house. In addition, I have a good number of files relating to current projects duplicated onto a drive that travels between my home office and my day gig at the Icon. This get copied to and backed up every day as I travel between home and work. I need to constantly revise my backup strategies to adapt to rapidly changing needs and technology and this little Mercury retrograde experience was necessary to shake me up a bit and keep me on my toes!

All of this toil and trouble was so that I could install a new computer and be ready to migrate all my data and plugin all my external dives and be up an running without too much grief. I’m happy to report that so far that has been the case. I’ll talk about the specifics of my final hardware setup in the next installment but the data backup and reorganizing was a very necessary step. This is also something that cannot be rushed. The process took all weekend to get to a place where I was comfortable switching over to a new machine and beginning work on a critical project with an impending deadline.

Does Mercury retrograde actually have a real effect? I can’t really say… perhaps its just all in ones attitude, You can view the world as a place full of mystery and hidden meaning – something that can be learned from and something that can be participated with OR… you can see it as an essentially meaningless mechanical thing that acts on us randomly – something that we must suffer through. I prefer to find meaning in everything – it makes it easier to deal with the many surprises.

Next up – setting up the hardware.