The digital age is awesome.  I know that statement is not surprising coming from a guy who calls himself e-effect, but think about your life and just how many things are impacted by it.  Most likely your day to day tasks at work are done via computer.  We have online bill pay.  A simple trip to the grocery store (to use a reference that redbeard_prime can relate with ;-) takes us from one digital machine to another as we have our deli goods weighed and bar coded, as we check our own groceries at the self checkout line and as we swipe our credit/debit cards to pay.  Who would have thought that we would pay for something in a store by shooting electrons down a wire?  Wicked. And don’t even get me started on the ease of watching DVDs days. Rewind buttons are so slow…and so out of style!

Beyond our day to day tasks we have found ways to digitize our personal lives as well.  How many of you have a digital camera?  If you’re like me then you probably take dozens of pictures of family and friends (especially furry ones) every month, and I don’t even want to get into how much digital video I record with my flip video camera.  Of course, if you’ve seen my studio or heard my music then you know that this area of my art would not exist if it wasn’t for the digital age.  I’d still be trying to figure out how to take the 10-part orchestral piece for our future RPG that plays in my head using just two hands and a piano.  I think I’d have better luck trying to make pigs fly.

The undulating beauty of the digital age is not without some rough water, though.  I don’t know how many times my friends and family have come to me with this senario: “My computer won’t start up and all of my personal pictures and documents are on there!  Help!”  In some instances I’ve been able to rig the drive or use alternative disc operating methods to extract the information, but that requires some technical skill and mucho time.  In other cases, the drives have been physically broken from laptops being dropped, power surges, etc. rendering the data completely unrecoverable.  Sometimes it’s not even an equipment malfunction that does it either.  My sister had her digital video camera stollen and with it all of the footage of her baby girl from birth to 2 years of age.  Tragic.

So with the digital age comes some unexpected and at times unseen responsibility.  That responsibility is to ensure that if something happens to your original files that you have another copy to go back to.  That’s right friends.  We’re talking about backing up your data because it turns out that even the digital age could use a rewind button every now and again.

Most of the time when I bring up this topic it makes people groan.  I get a lot of “I don’t have time for that” or “That’s to complicated” statements made with not so subtle whinny overtones.  Other people tell me that they don’t need to!  It’s as if they can plan for an accident that they don’t know is coming!  The thing is that backing up computer files is actually very easy to do.  As an electronic musician and game developer it is essential since all of my songs, sound effects, programs, and musical and game ideas are stored on my computers.  If I do not want to lose any of that data then I have to take the time to back it up.  The thing is that I’m like you!  I don’t have lots of time and I don’t have time to deal with a complicated procedure.  For this reason, I’ve developed a quick and easy method to maintain a daily backup of all of your data.  The best part about this is that I promise you that the time you spend backing your files up is hundreds of times less than the time it will take to recover your data after a crash.  And that is assuming your data is even recoverable or has not been stolen.

If you’ve read my previous blog posts or visited my music website, then you know I enjoy giving back.  So many of the artistic things I do today is because someone else took their time out to teach me.  To honor their gift and keep the teaching cycle going I have dedicated a special section on my music website where I can give back.  I call it my ARTISTS page.  While most of the articles and tutorials are technically aimed at the electronic music producer, this time ’round our topic of discussion applies to all walks of the digital life.  Head on over to the link below to make sure you’ll never lose any of your personal data and prove that even in this digital age we can still have a rewind button!

http://www.e-effectmusic.com/artists/articles/file_back_up_method.html

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 27th, 2008 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.