Without question, the most treasured possessions a photographer owns are the images which reflect their journeys in art and exploration. Long hours in a hide, serendipitous moments, archives of time, fortuitous encounters, creative breakthroughs—photos bring stories to life and are the livelihood of artists and journalists. As such, photographers take care to prioritise backups and protect their hard drives… unfortunately, sometimes this is not enough.
Drive Genius 5: A Photographers Secret Weapon
The most overlooked and common catastrophe a photographer encounters is an undetected failure to their backup drive—they were running a backup, or thought they were, but the backup drive failed months ago and they had no idea!
This is where Drive Genius by Prosoft comes in. With Drive Genius installed and Drive Pulse running in the background the software will check your drives whenever they are idle so you will be warned before ever suffering from a data loss. With cleanroom recovery prices a hard drive recovery can be anywhere from $500-$2500 depending on who you ask, and maintaining the health of your drives should prevent you from ever needing the service.
Drive Genius is built and designed to prevent a user from running into a data loss situation, and unfortunately photographers and musicians are some of Prosoft’s most popular clients.
Drive Pulse
The best part of having Drive Genius installed on your system is the built in Drive Pulse utility. Drive Pulse will scan your drives when your computer is in idle mode, this means that only when your computer is not processing information will these scans be run. You will never need to be concerned with the software slowing down any work your are doing on your system. The scans run by Drive Pulse are going to be all the tools included in the software Protect Section: Extended Physical Check, Consistency Check, Repair, Rebuild, Fix Permissions (not included in 10.10+ OS restriction) as well as checking for fragmentation status.
The scans run by Drive Pulse are the best indication to your hard drives health. The drive pulse icon which is visible in the menu bar on the top right hand corner of your screen will be black by default, but will change to yellow with a minor issue, and change to red when there is something that requires immediate attention.
The goal with Drive Pulse is that the user never needs to worry about taking care of there drives, let the software take care of them for you and just keep an eye open for any major issues.
Defragment
When it comes to photographers there are hundreds to thousands of photos being uploaded, and edited on a daily basis. All this saving and moving of files on your system is going to lead to your drives becoming fragmented, which will cause your system to noticeably slow down. The Drive Genius defragment tool is easy to use and will get your drives back working at peak performance.
Repartition
With up to thousands of photos being added on a daily basis it becomes hard to keep track of all your files, folders and projects. The new Repartition tool included in Drive Genius is the easiest to use repartition tool on the market allowing you to add, resize and move any of your partitions.
Partitioning your drive is essentially splitting the drive to be recognized as multiple drives, this helps with organization as well as helps isolate corruption to a single partition.
Clone
The Clone tool in Drive Genius will do a full system clone, including your Operating System. This makes it ideal when setting up a new computer that you want to be exactly like your old one, or when you need to swap out your internal hard drive for a newer or faster drive. Prosoft is mainly a data recovery company, so they like to put backup tools in as many of their software’s as possible and heavily stress that their customers run regular backups. Hard drives are designed to last about 3-5 years but most people, especially in businesses, will use the same hard drive for 10 years without every backing up or checking their drives.
A Suite of Security
The health of hard drive health is crucial if you are in the photography or video editing business. You can’t re-take every photo. Your data reliability needs to be 100% secure. Drive Genius automates your hard drive protection for you. The software automatically scans your hard drive for physical and logical errors, and repairs them when found. Photographers and video editors can rest assured that their hard drive is cared for when they purchase Drive Genius 5.
Prosoft’s award winning Data Rescue software is also relevant and topical for photographers. Digital photography companies come out with new personal file types often. If you are facing a data loss scenario while using a new file type, where other data recovery softwares can’t recognize the file, Data Rescue can recover your photos. Data Rescue has a feature called File IQ which can learn new file types. Show the software 5-10 examples of the new file type, and Data Rescue can search through your hard drive for the specific file type.
Software details and demo available from: prosofteng.com
