The Problem GoodSync Solves….

As a photographer, we’re dealing with huge files ALL the time, many of which we bin after we’ve finished a project – these fill hard drives, meaning you’ll waste £££££ on hard drives.

We’ve found GoodSync solves this problem so quickly and easily – for $29 for the pro version!

Many photographers will use a RAID system of hard drives to make sure if a disc goes down, they are safe.

This system is about making backups which SAVE SPACE 

This tends to happen…

1. Get the photos off your camera and into your working drive – usually a fast SSD drive
2. Make a backup copy – just to be safe! 
3. Do your work – usually over a few days, or weeks, depending on how long clients take to choose etc.
4. More daily backups of everything
5. Eventually, when you’ve finished “work”, you’d have a quick tidy up on your working drive – delete intermediate files etc. 
6. Finalise backups and move the files off the Working Drive to a different one – not an expensive SSD.

Now the problem is keeping those backups in sync. 

What you’d normally do….

You’d typically just copy the entire folder  (using Windows explorer or finder on a mac) – but you’re copying EVERYTHING, but not deleting the garbage.

In step 5, the “tidy up”, you will delete many GBytes of files, BUT you will not delete that backed-up garbage, meaning your drives will be massive, you will waste space, you’ll have to spend to get more drives.

What Good Synch Does

It adds AND deletes files to your backup drive

Here’s how it works

Create a “Job”

Just give it a name… meaningful so you know what it does

Set up the JOB

Here you pick the source folder (where your working files are) – click the folder buttons at the top where it says “Please click here to select folder”. The left one is the source

Then pick where you want them to go – to the right folder.

So here I’m copying everything from my August 2017 folder to August 2017 on my “I Drive” – which is a backup.

Click on Analyze

Next the clever bit – when you click Analyze, it works out what’s is new and needs to be copied to your backup AND what needs to be removed!

It can take a little while on big folders – but when you’ve run it a few times it seems to “remember” stuff and speed up.

It gives lots of stats and a little update on every file – for the geeky, this is heaven, for the rest of us we can ignore most of it.

Hit Synch

Now just hit the sync button – GoodSync then just works down every file and does one of 3 things:-

1. copies it to the backup folder
2. ignores it altogether
3. deletes it from the backup folder

And that’s it

How to keep backed up all the time

Above we set up that job – that’s not actually the end of the story, we can set GoodSync up to automatically run these jobs whenever we like.

At the top right of the program, there’s a picture of a clock with “Auto” below it – press this to get the following box.

Ok – it’s a big box, but it gives you lots of options on when to Automatically run backups.

So if you”re paranoid, it can run every time you change a file!

Periodically would be more sensible – maybe every hour, or every few hours, or if you’re on mission critical stuff, every 10 minutes.

You can even do a timed schedule – maybe at 3 AM when you’re tucked up in bed.

Integrations with stuff you love

And finally, I’ve just covered backing up to hard drives – but you may also want to backup to remote things like:-

• Google Drive
• DROPBOX
• An FTP Location

Well you can see them all here:-

So if you want to keep those vital files save on a remote server, then you can send them to many different platforms.

Why we love it…

In a nutshell, we have always tried to intelligently back things up regularly – and that means only backing up stuff we actually need.

This never happened, we have probably terabytes of TIFFS, HDRs and PSDs we just don’t need.

With GoodSync that is all taken care of – without us ever having to do anything anymore!