Backing up your images

Backup solutions Part one

All of us at one time or another have had that sinking feeling when we’ve accidentally erased something important. Unfortunately,  it is all too easy to lose our images if we don’t take some precautionary steps as hard drives do fail, and optical media can suddenly become unreadable.

For example, when I submit images for publication, I typically burn them to CD/DVD’s. I then check them for readability on two different computers before sending them. Despite this, I’ve had times when a disk was not readable at the destination. I’ve also had hard drives fail suddenly and lost images due to theft. Therefore, some kind of backup strategy is necessary if you are to protect your images long term.

Any backup strategy is essentially a function of money and how much risk you are willing to accept. For example, you could have your main library on your computer, and have it backed up to an external hard drive. The problem with using that strategy alone is that in the case of a computer disk failure, all your eggs are in one basket. Additionally, if there is a fire or a break-in, all your images will be lost.

The best archiving and backup strategies involve levels of redundancy to allow for simple failures such as computer hard drive failure, to complex failures such as a fire or theft. Generally, you need to have one backup with your computer, and another that is kept off site(work, relatives or friends). That way if there is a catastrophic failure such as a fire, you will have an additional backup off site that you can use to rebuild your library. I personally use the program by Apple called “Aperture”. It allows and manages the multiple backups that I keep on external hard drives(with some kept off site).

The bare minimum backup strategy I would recommend would be to have at least two copies of your images on CD/DVD’s in addition to your main computer hard drive. I would also suggest that the brands of the optical media be different, and to avoid the real discount disks(Verbatim is good).

A better strategy would involve two external hard drives, one is kept with your computer, and is backed up every time you add images to your computer. The second backup is kept off site, and you periodically rotate it with the one at the main computer.  Backing up a day’s shoot on CD/DVD will also serve as an additional level of backup should you have a catastrophic loss before you backup the off site hard drive.

There are other more expensive solutions to backing up your library such as RAID systems where your data is backed up to multiple disks. They all have pluses and minuses, but they are all vulnerable to fire or theft, so you still need to have some kind of off site backup.

In summary, any backup strategy should allow for disasters like fire or theft in addition to the expected hard drive failures. Exactly how much and how far you take it depends on how much money you are willing to spend and your own level of paranoia.

The final weak link in the chain is the need to discipline yourself to ensure your backups are up to date. A future article will discuss specific software solutions that address backing up your data.