Well I had a little minor catastrophe yesterday. Since I’ve had issues with computers in the past and losing valuable data, I’ve learned one thing. Backup and do often and in several places. Don’t rely on one back up either. This I found to be true yesterday.
It all started with me actually wanting to do my weekly backup. Relying heavily on my iPad and computer, I back up regularly. I do a weekly backup of my iPad on iTunes as well as have the iCloud backup feature turned on. Since iOS 9 though, iCloud backup isn’t reliable so I don’t hold too much comfort in it. Yesterday at the time of catastrophe, the last iCloud backup I had was 4/19/16. So my main back up method of my iPad, where my art is contained, is iTunes. Imagine my horror when I plug in to do my backup and I get several errors, a trigger on my antivirus and a message saying that my iPad couldn’t be backed up because of incompatible data. What?! I try again, same error. I try to restore from a previous backup from a week ago and here is the clincher. That backup was corrupted as were the last three before that.
Well after a little freak out session, I took my computer and iPad to my brother who does computer work for a living. He took a look. Apparently my iPad had a windows virus on it and was trying to infect my computer. Considering I have a Mac and not a PC it didn’t infect my computer but it did corrupt backups and prevented any new backups from being made. Because Apple loves keeping things a secret, it is very difficult accessing certain parts of the iPad, at least with out jailbreaking it. We tried restoring from the iCloud backup I did have. It restored, but with the stinking virus on it.
Now I was irritated but not too worried as I had backups of most important stuff, except one thing I neglected. This is where my heart dropped in my stomach. I hadn’t backed up the actual art work that I was working on in my art app, ProCreate. I had the png files but not the open layers files. My snow leopard painting that I’m almost finished with wast there. I had to save it! So with the restored but virus ladened iPad I exported the .procreate files for the 4 pieces I was working on. The .procreate files are like .psd aka photoshop files that keep layers intact. In fact you can export .psd files instead from ProCreate if you wanted to. I uploaded them to my iCloud Drive which is one of my many cloud backups. They were safe. The next thing my brother recommended was to wipe the iPad and start new. That means no restore from a previous back up. The thing I dreaded came to be. Reluctantly I made sure everything I wanted to keep was safe and we hit the nuke button.
I set up the iPad as new, and got my settings back in order. I then downloaded my most used apps aka ProCreate and a few others. I imported some of my photos and imported my brush settings and .procreate files back to ProCreate. YAY! They opened up and work. I didn’t lose any artwork!. I actually really didn’t lose anything this time around. I probably will find something gone eventually, but the stuff I need now is safe.
What’s the lesson here. Don’t rely on one back up method and have several different backups of valuable documents.
 |
| Yay! She is saved! |
So what is my back up methods?
First, I have my full backups. I backup to iTunes once a week and try to back up to iCloud nightly. Sometimes that works, sometimes not, so I don’t rely on iCloud backup to heavily. I also will backup to iTunes if I have a major project that I progressed on so I don’t lose anything. The bad thing about these types of backups, like iTunes and Time Machine is that they can fail and you can’t recover individual files from them if needed. It is an all or nothing approach.
To remedy this disadvantage, I make copies of valuable files in three different locations locally and 3 different locations that are cloud based. The things I back up are all my finished art files, my ebooks, photos, and music. They reside on an external hard drive, a flash or thumb drive, and an sd external storage drive. These are all kept in sync with a program called D sync.
I also have these same files in the cloud as well. I use my iCloud drive which is different than an iCloud backup. You can send individual files to iCloud Drive and pull them down as well. I also use dropbox for a few things like my Procreate brushes. I only have the free version of Dropbox so not a lot of storage. I also use a program called sugar sync which is ok and keeps certain folders on my computer in sync with the cloud. The final program I use is Crashplan. It makes a copy of files and folders I choose both locally on an external drive as well as in the cloud on their servers.
Some data specific backups that I use are Amazon for my ebooks iTunes Match for my music and iPhoto for my pictures, mind you I have local backups of all these files as well.
So you see, I might have backup overkill here, but after losing data in the past I’d rather be prepared than not. This is especially true now that my business relies on the data on my computer. and iPad.
There are advantages of being a digital artist. Being able to change things on the fly, experimenting and not committing to a certain style eat. One disadvantage, is that our digital creations are just pixels until printed out, and they can easily be destroyed all with a simple computer crash.
The general recommendation for backups is to have at least 2 local or onsite backups and one cloud based. I have more but then I am paranoid like that. One big tip for other digital artists out there, while you may be backing up your completed works, don’t forget to back up those in progress works complete with the layers. Backup the .psd files in photoshop or the .procreate files in Procreate. and don’t rely on one method for all your backup needs.
Hope this helps!
—Becky Herrera
www.beckysdigitalart.com
No comments:
Post a Comment