OK, if you’ve gotten this far I guess that either I convinced you to join fotki or at the very least I haven’t driven you off. Or perhaps you’re now so worried that you’re going to lose all your family photo’s, or more critically, you’re afraid of what your non-tech spouse will do when that happens. :-)   

What happens if fotki goes out of business, you ask. Will I lose all my photo’s stored there?

 The short answer is, “Yes” . Could this happen? Hey, if you lived through the dot-com bubble burst of 2001, I’m sure that you’re just being rhetorical. So Goose, what’s the deal? In your last post, you just convinced me to put all my photo’s on fotki so that if my hard drive crashed, I’ld be safe.  Now you’re telling me that fotki could go out of business, and I’m equally &%&^’ed?

Well, here’s where we take the “belt & suspenders” approach (picture it in your mind if you’ve never heard that expression before). Fotki is the answer to our worry of a hard drive crash. What’s our protection against a fotki bankruptcy? Our hard drive, of course. (I’m not crazy. The probability of these two mutually redundant, independent events happening simultaneously is now quite small.) So, if you’ve gone to the trouble of carefully organizing your pictures on fotki, the following method will retain all that hard work.

If you are running linux (or unix) at home or work, you most likely have all the tools that you’ll need already on your system. Believe it or not, a simple one line command is all you need to synchronize (or mirror) your entire photo collection at fotki with your local hard drive. The magic incantations is (make sure to change the items in red to your values):

   wget -o fotki.log -T 240 -m -c -P /your/directory/here ftp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@ftp.fotki.com/

Just throw this into a cron entry (if you’re already running linux then I hope that I don’t need to explain this to you.  If so, go get a “Dummies” book). The beauty of wget with the supplied run flags is that it will compare the files on your local disk with what’s on fotki, and only download what’s new or changed. So… the first time you run the command, it will go and copy everything (while retaining your carefully laid out directory structure). Every time after that you’ll only get the differences. Your ISP will like, fotki will like you, and most critically, your significant other will like you, because you’re now protected.

What happens if your hard drive crashes? Just rebuild your machine, grab a copy of this magic command, let it fly, and you’re back in business. And if fotki goes belly up? You’ve got a current copy on your local drive, and you drop me an email asking what to do next (By then we’ll both hope that flickr offers a similar ftp interface!)

Hey, what about me, all you windows users ask? (Don’t worry, I’m reasonably OS agnostic. I run Windows XP, Linux (gentoo), & OS X at home! Well, it’s only slightly more complicated, only because wget & cron don’t come built in with Windows. However, it is available for free download from http://xoomer.virgilio.it/hherold/. Follow the installation instructions (I put my copy in “C:\Program Files\Wget\wget.exe”). Next go to the Control Panel (If I have to explain this, please track down a friend that knows something about Windows to help you). Look for and open “Scheduled Tasks” Add Scheduled Task(I know this is available on Windows XP and Windows 2000. Anything older and you’re on your own!).  Double click “Add Scheduled Task” , and follow the Wizard’s directions. When you are asked to “Click the Program that you want Windows to run”, select “Browse…” and then select the location where you installed wget, and pick wget.exe.  (We’ll add parameters later).

Next you have to select the frequency that this task should run.  I suggest running the process daily, at a time that you know that your machine will be turned on and/or lightly used. (I’m assuming that you’re always connected to the internet with some kind of “always on” access, either DSL, Cable, or your neighbor’s unprotected wireless network.)

Finish following the directions until you see “Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish”.  Select this. You should then see something like:

Now add the following to the “Run:” section, being careful to get all your double quotes in the right place:

    "C:\Program Files\Wget\wget.exe" -o "C:\Documents and Settings\yourname\My Documents\My Pictures\fotki.log” -T 240 -m -c -P “C:\Documents and Settings\yourname\My Documents\My Pictures” ftp://USERNAME:PASSWORD@ftp.fotki.com/

If you want to test to see if you got it right, go back to the “Scheduled Tasks” and right click on your new “wget” task. The first option should be “Run”. If everything went as planned, after a reasonable amount of time you should have a directory “C:\Documents and Settings\yourname\My Documents\My Pictures\ftp.fotki.com”, with an identical copy to what you have at fotki (which should be “originals” of all your photo’s). If you want two belts plus suspenders, run the wget batch job on two different machines (I run one on linux & another on Windows, at two different locations).

It’s a bit more work in Windows, but in the end, it’s just a one line command.

    - The Goose

P.S. On OS X, wget is not installed. I know that you can use “curl -O” for fetching a single file, but I’m not sure about how the different commandline switches translate. Best solution… find and install wget for OS X.