Monitoring your Photo Backups!

How do you know that your backups contain what you think they contain? How can you discover if you've accidentally deleted a file that you didn't mean to delete?

Some very good questions that arrived in my Inbox from Greg Wellman. He writes:

Do you use any type of folder/directory monitor to watch your Mozy-mirrored files for changes? My one big worry with Mozy is that if one of my kids accidentally deletes something (and I don't catch it within 30 days), that file is gone forever. Or, if I should get some sort of virus, file corruption could get mirrored to Mozy. So, I've been looking for some little background utility to watch the same folders I have mirrored to Mozy and tell me via email when something changes in those folders.

I think this is a great question & Greg brings up an important point - your backups are no good if you are also backing up your mistakes or missing them until after it's too late. I replied with a couple of my own thoughts:

• I don't have any kids, but if I did they wouldn't have access to my photo workstation. Not only does it put your images at risk (both from accidental deletion and viruses), but it also makes it hard to claim your PC as 100% business expense!
• I use SyncBack SE to copy my pictures from my active (main) drive over to my external backup drive. When I run the program it shows a list of the copys/deletes that it is about to make & I scan through that before I hit "go". It also has the ability to not immediately delete files on the target drive if they've been recently modified or deleted... this can help to prevent an "oops". I highly recommend the SyncBack software & even the free version is very feature-rich.

The monitoring program that Greg suggests does sound kind of interesting. I'd approach it as if it were a simple report of the major changes that have taken place & let it run & email you on a weekly (daily?) basis. I don't know of a program that can do this, although the aforementioned SyncBack software *does* have the ability to email reports & run on a schedule, so you may be able to utilize it for this purpose as well.

So, what is the best way to monitor your files as Greg suggests? Do you think there's a better method than the one I'm proposing with the SyncBack email solution? I'd love to hear some comments on this one!!

Mozy Discounts...
Completely by coincidence, I happened to receive a note from the Mozy folks today about two new discount codes that they're running in January. Try one of these to save some cash!

• JANUARY - 10% off an annual subscription to MozyUnlimited
• JANUARY2 - 10% off a biannual subscription to MozyUnlimited
  

Hope everyone has a safe and fun New Year's Eve!
2007 = donezo