Retro seems to be a word thrown around alot these days, so I looked it up:  “Retro is a culturally outdated or aged style, trend, mode, or fashion, from the overall postmodern past, that has since that time become functionally or superficially the norm once again… It generally implies a vintage of at least 15 or 20 years.”

I just hope corduroy does not become the fashion again!  It seemed like forever ago my friends and I were going down to RollerRoyce rollerdrome to play Galaga and Pacman and strap these clunky wheels on our feet.  The only way they are going to be remotely  in my life again however will be in a photoshoot on a stellar (retro phrase!)  model like Katya.

The disco ball brings it all home… after all,  it was the John Travolta Flashdance era.   I really love shoots with themed colors… makes them look planned.   In reality the socks actually had blue stripes, but you can spend a day looking for matching socks or a few minutes in photoshop solving that problem.

If these shots look familiar,  it’s probably because they are from the banner of the front page of my website… If you guessed correctly,  come collect your free photoshoot at Bryan Ward Ph0tography Ltd… Just kidding!

The headshot was a reversed closeup of this shot,  did you catch that?   My backgrounds came from  vector art  of two wallpaper styles from Istockphoto.com…  I should probably revisit the last shot and add it in.

I sure hope you are regularly backing up your data!  For years i had thought CD’s were a safe choice to keep my important files.  Back then we were led on that this was the best choice.   Not until years later after backing up data to a raid array did I discover that certain brands of CD (Ridata for one) had high failure rates (5 discs / 100) starting to show up after 4 years.  Two more years later it was 7/100.

Now everything is safely backed up on a Raid array… or so I thought!  One day when two computers simultaneously accessed the same file… Boom!… Lost the Raid.  It took three months and two data recovery companies (Was going to cost me $3K) before i realized it was unrecoverable.    I though using a raid with a hot spare drive kept me safe with an archive of dvd’s as backup.    Now there are three raids on premise all mirroring each other… maybe overkill but better than then lose all those years of hard work… keeping my fingers crossed we don’t get that big solar flare but we’d all be screwed at that point anyway.

I have never been comfortable with shipping my info into cyberspace to backup companies (icloud)  and i did not like how Time machine kept filling up my entire hard drives.  I have tried so many backup programs that have fallen short.   At a recent seminar i was turned on to Chronosync… I tried the demo software and was impressed enough to buy it… and write about it!

It’s really impressive how much control this backup software give you.  One really great feature could be backing up your data to a laptop from your tower,  taking the laptop home and working on files, then the next day ChronoSync will update your laptop files back onto the tower, keeping everything current.

For my own situation with Raids topping 3 TB of data,  doing a full backup literally takes 6-12 hours.  ChronoSync intelligently looks for ‘Changes’ between files update and can  delete them from your backup drive to mirror you master drive.   The first time pressing the ’sync’ button was scary and I tried to call the company to make sure all the settings were right… sadly they have no phone support.  I diligently  read the manual a few times… not that this was a difficult process, but when it comes to this much digital info, you really don’t want to make a mistake.  In the end it was easy and I was impressed that it could scan  two 3TB raids,  disseminate file differences and do a  50 GB backup all under 30 minutes.

The program is $40… heres’ the link:

http://www.econtechnologies.com/pages/cs/chrono_overview.html