For goodness sake, back up your data.

OK, this is kind of an excuse to try out MarsEdit for a blogging program.  Since it can link to Tumblr, all the better.

I picked this image as a reminder to myself, and to others, OK, the one other person that might read this blog (thanks Ryan), back up your data and photos.  This is an image from the painted hills sections of John Day, Oregon.  It was one of many that got lost because I wasn’t religious about backing up my photos.  Now I am.  I lost all these image and a terrific Photoshop’d image of Haceta Head Lighthouse in Oregon.  As soon as that happened, I went to double external hard drives.  I was using Lacie drives, a 500 gigabyte drive, backed up by another identical drive.  That served me well until I hit 80% capacity, more on that in a second.  The Lacie drives worked flawlessly, except for their crappy external power supplies.  Between various power surges in Oregon and Utah, I had to replace THREE external power supplies. OK, lesson 2 has been learned, plug the darn things into a GOOD surge suppressor and uninterruptible power supply.

My current hardware configuration is a new Rocstar raid drive, 4 terabytes, consisting of 4 1-terabyte drives.  Drives one and three are striped, drives 2 and 4 are back ups to drives 1 and 3, so technically, I have a 2 terabyte external drive. That drive is plugged into an APC UIPS.  If the house burns down, I’m in trouble.

Back to the photo; the painted hills section of John Day National Monument is a spectacular location.  In the middle of nowhere Oregon, and I do mean nowhere.  Good luck trying to find a hotel nearby.  Having said that, I will have to head back there and get some more photos.  The hills consist of various oxides which create the streaky colors.  You can’t walk on the hills for obvious reasons, but with a 70-200mm lens, you can capture some great images.

Well, let’s publish this blog and see if MarsEdit is as good as people say it is.