Backups and you
Heya, I wanted to write a little thing about how to automate your backups, since I’ve seen too many artists lose a bunch of work recently and it breaks my heart! Did you know it’s possible to nearly entirely automate your backup system? Because it is, and it’s really worth doing!
Where to store backups
External Storage: Buy an external hard drive. This isn’t the cheapest option, but it’s worth making the investment, if you can. I’m particularly fond of Seagate drives (£40-100, though people are selling them second hand for £25), and that’ll store between 500GB-4TB of your work- I’ve got about 1000 high-res comic files that’re between 50-150mb each on my 1TB drive, for reference, and I’m not quite out of room yet. They’re all very compact, and just connect via USB, generally, so they don’t take up much room.
If that’s a bit too pricey for you, maybe grab a USB stick or two- Sandisk are good- and that’ll cover you for 64GB for £13, which for me is a couple-hundred high res comic files.
Cloud storage: Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage for free, so use it! It’s not a lot of room, really- I can fit maybe 50 comic pages in there- but it’s better than nothing. Google Drive also gives you 15GB of free storage! You could use both, if you like, 17GB free is not nothing. If you’ve got the money, here’s the current prices for upgrading those:
Dropbox Pro (1TB, or 1000+ comic pages) - £80 a year, or £8 a month
Google Drive (100GB, or about 600+ comic pages) - £1.59 a month
(1TB, or 1000+ comic pages) - £8 a month
It’s worth having BOTH an external and a cloud backup. Please, if possible, do both!
Backup programs
(This will be all Windows-based, I’m afraid, if anyone wants to tag on a Mac version of these, please do!)
Here’s a couple of programs that make the backup process really easy, and bonus, they’re free!
FreeFileSync is my fav right now, all you do is set up the folder pairings- so you pair up your usual art folder with your external drive, USB, dropbox folder, or whatever- and let it run. So my dropbox backup looks like this:
meaning that when I run this, it’ll compare all of the files on my C:\Comic Files folder to the ones in my Dropbox. So if I’ve done some work on a file…
..it shows me, and I hit ‘Synchronise’ to copy the updated file over to the dropbox folder. Nice and simple.
There’s also a microsoft product called Synctoy that does the same sort of thing, also free!
That’s all well and good, but I keep forgetting to run my backup program!
Then automate that too! You can use Task Scheduler to pop up your Sync program at a certain time of day, and that’s already inbuilt in Windows.
Just set whatever time of day suits you here…
Then click browse, and find your Sync program.
This whole setup means your very easy to use sync program will pop up at a set time of day, every day, and all you need to do is hit ‘synchronise’ and you’re all backed up. That’s it! Easy, stress-free backups.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to have something in place for this- trust me, as someone who’s had a whole unbackedup laptop stolen previously, losing all your hard work is pure pain. Please back up!
Edit: Thanks for this info about programs for the mac, @theblamegabe !
To fill in the gap: Macs have a built in feature called Time Machine. It’s pretty plug and go - turn it on, indicate how often you want it to do back ups, and choose your external HD as the save location. It’ll run all by itself. Easy!
You can even get it to keep multiple separate backups throughout the hours, days and weeks.
