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A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
March Archived
1 April 2021
We've just archived Volume 10, Number 3 of Photo Corners on the Archive page with 18 Features, 31 commented News stories, 27 Editor's Notes (which included 204 items of interest), one review and one site note for a total of 78 stories.
That's a nice pick up from last month, showing a little life in the industry with twice as many news stories and 48 more items of interest. Guess we'll stick around another month to see what happens.
In 34 of those stories we published 119 images and five of them had specifications tables. There were three obituaries, as well.
OUR READERSHIP numbers are never complete when we sit down to compile this report for you, who we consider our stockholder. But trends are obvious.
Unique site visitors rebounded as we broke the million page barrier with 1,023,831 pages served (with a day to go). We did have an indexing spike in the middle of the month (looks like Bing was catching up) but it only lasted a day, so we'll just have to live with that.
OUR MOST POPULAR STORY was our Nikon NX Studio news story followed by a Horn and our report on the Lightroom March upgrades. Fourth place but by only a click was our report on the Capture One 21 update, which was followed by three Horns.
The last story we published may have been the most significant.
All of those stories were published before the middle of the month, which indicates, on the one hand, that more than our top stories are found on our home page. On the other hand, what we published yesterday won't fully register on the scale for a couple of weeks.
The last story we published may have been the most significant.
It announced the release of Mirror Mirror our free Keyboard Maestro macro to do backups with rsync. We just happened to release it on World Backup Day, too.
Why does that matter?
If you rely on a computer long enough, you will one day find out that backups are essential to your mental health. We just spent half an hour on the phone with a distraught relative who had accidentally installed Big Sur on an external drive she used for data. The installer reformatted the drive and she had, in seconds, lost years of memories.*
Stories like that only have happy endings if there's a backup around.
But backups are a chore. They take time or are difficult to configure. And if you configure them incorrectly, you can really screw things up.
We previously reviewed FreeFileSync, which we use daily (along with Time Machine), to handle batches of backups. But we also have a number of Keyboard Maestro macros that run rsync to copy important documents we're working on to an external drive before FreeFileSync gets its hands on them or just to copy new images to our three external archives.
We wanted a utility that made it easy to run rsync (which only updates a backup with file changes so it's really fast) to copy anything anywhere on demand, remember what it did and reverse the process if we later screw something up on the original.
And that's exactly what Mirror Mirror does. It just asks for a source and a target and off it goes, safely duplicating the source on the target and prompting you for a name after it's done (which you can skip). The next time you run it, its command center defaults to that command among a list of all the commands you've saved but all its buttons are live, so you can do anything with a click.
It's painless, fast, safe and even a little fun. Which are words that have rarely been used to describe backups.