Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Safety First

I'm about to start editing.

Before we use any power tools, let's take a moment to talk about shop safety. Be sure to read, understand, and follow all the safety rules that come with your power tools. Knowing how to use your power tools properly will greatly reduce the risk of personal injury. And remember this: there is no more important safety rule than to wear these — safety glasses. - Norm Abrams, The New Yankee Workshop.
But first, safety. Each time I flip the switch on that external hard drive, that precious home to the fruits of many hours' labor and the sum total of Going Cardboard's assets, there's a teeny chance something might go wrong. It's a very small chance, mind you, but editing's going to have me flipping that switch a lot more often. So, before I embark, time to back up the data.

It's already hundreds of gigabytes, and while hard drive space is not THAT expensive, it isn't peanuts. Luckily, a friend had a great recommendation for how to economically back up large amounts of data: this handy, dandy SATA HD Docking Station!

It slices, it dices, it lets you plug bare hard drives in and throw data right onto them.

I bought this thing quite a while ago, but last night it finally came out of the packaging, along with a bare 1 TB hard drive (wow, so heavy). It's not just plug and play and that's it, but the setup walkthrough in the manual was crystal clear, and in minutes I had a new hard drive up and was copying footage to it. I'm going back to newegg today to add a review, because it was a great user experience and they deserve it.

3 comments:

  1. However many drives you use to back up your footage, make sure you spin them up regularly, just to be safe.

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  2. That's good advice - thank you! :)

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  3. Wow, that's awesome...I didn't know such a device existed.

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