In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
-John McCrae
What thing I love about Grass Valley is the strong creative community, especially among wedding professionals. Through local groups and The Studio Collective I’ve been able to go beyond a working relationship and develop real friendships! So it was fun to travel down with some of those friends to visit the creative startup HoneyBook and join the kickoff for the Rising Tide Society Tuesdays Together in San Francisco!
HoneyBook has an amazing office, the location of Twitter’s first headquarters(!), with so much light and awesome styling! While I got to hang out there for a couple of hours the next day, I certainly wouldn’t mind working there every day!
Looking for new ways to be creative in the new year (or perhaps a last minute Christmas gift?)? How about a Pigment and Parchment workshop for watercolor and hand-lettering! My sister was lucky to join in when Rosaura came out to the Roots Reclaimed Studio for an all day workshop. I came along to capture some of the fun! There’s just something so inspiring about hanging out with other creatives, especially in such a bright and inspiring space!
Nicole and Beth from Roots Reclaimed put together these cute mini parfaits and veggie shooters to keep everyone fueled and happy!
For some this might seem overkill, but I’m pretty protective of my pictures. It’s not so much losing a cool picture that bothers me as much as losing history, stories, and heritage for the next generation! So with offsite storage figured out, it was time to tackle the mess of hard drives and cords that spilled off the shelves and pooled around the legs of my desk!
For years I was having to purchase larger and larger hard drives as I would fill one up and need more room to store all my files. The problem is, as I wanted everything backed up twice, half the files would be on one drive and half on another with their duplicates also strewn across multiple drives. Yes, everything was safe, but it was messy, confusing, and would take hours to back everything up each time I cleared off my computer!
I knew I needed to make a change for my own sanity’s sake, so after much research, I decided to make the investment in 4TB G-Drives by G-Technology. They’re built to last, have plenty of storage space, and are even kinda pretty for a hard drive!
Easy to use, I just plugged both drives into my Mac and used Disk Utility to set up a Raid 1 so a copy of each file would be on both hard drives. This way if one hard drive gets damaged or corrupt, all the files is still be safe on the other drive! I would just need to buy a new drive, plug it in, and have the system copy everything over onto the new drive to be back to normal!
So while I still have a small, travel hard drive for my Time Machine backups (a must for Mac users, let me tell you it has saved my life!), everything, I mean everything fits on these two pretty drives!
It took awhile, but it’s such a relief to have everything finally figured out and in place! So if you have any questions about my offsite or onsite backup systems, just leave me a note in the comments!
And be on the lookout for good deals on used hard drives… ;-)
Oh the glamorous hidden world of backup systems… In this digital age and fire-prone state of California, protecting my pictures has been a top priority and a thorn in my side from the very beginning!
Call me “better-safe-than-sorry,” but my system has multiple backups of each image on an external hard drive at home, online, and on an external hard drive at another location. But getting the pictures to each of these three places has been time-consuming and just plain annoying! So while most people will never see this side of my business, this new setup is going to make such a difference for me on the back end, and I’m so excited about that!
Enter part one of my new backup system: offsite storage.
Offsite storage is important because even if my office burned down, I would still be able to retrieve a copy of my work without having to download everything from the web. Still, the regular external hard drives I was using were clunky, hard to transport, and took up too much storage space. Now with my new system of using raw hard drives, I’m able to solve all those problems!
All you need is a dock that will plug into your computer to read and write to the drives. This also eliminates all the extra cords and plugs from multiple drives and keeps things tidy and simple! Once you’re done backing up to the drive, just eject it from the dock, slip it in a case, and transfer it offsite. Done and done!
It took me months of research and many helpful people to come up with the best system for my business. So if you’re looking for new solutions and have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments below!
