Fun and games with backups

Backing up is a serious business. And at MMISoftware we like to keep backups of, well, everything. Over the years we have used a range of methods, including incremental backups to CDs and DVDs, but our current preferred method is to backup to external hard-drives and then remove them to a safe place…

Recently I had a ‘backup’ failure, we didn’t lose any data, but our back-up strategy failed.

Basically what happened was a new external drive was bought (we actually used the Apple Store as they had drives at a good price with a free ‘24 hour delivery’), and plugged in for a routine back-up.

However, the backup failed. Odd…. Tried again, same failure. Copy error. Copy error on a brand new disk. So what gives?

Well, it turns out that the LaCie drives that Apple sells are formatted for DOS, and every time the back-up reached 3 GB plus the backup would fail! Weird. Why would Apple sell DOS formatted drives? How many other customers are experiencing that problem? Very annoying….

Anyway, the problem was easy to fix. Fired up ‘Disk Utility’ and reformatted the drive for ‘Mac OS Extended’, and now everything works….

So, if you have a new external drive and are lovingly backing up all the photos you have geotagged, or added meta-data to, with PhotoInfoEditor or PhotoGPSEditor, and you keep getting a ‘copy failure’, you might want to check the format of the external drive….

PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor are freeware programs from MMISoftware – continued development can be supported by making donations (PhotoInfoEditor Donation | PhotoGPSEditor Donation), or purchases at the MMISoftware GPS and camera stores.

Both programs are available for download: