The Art of Seeing

What's the next most important thing after taking a good photo in photography?

It is to back it up!

The fact of the matter is that your hard disk drive will crash, die and burn a horrible death one fine day. Someone said "Death and Taxes are the only sure things in life". Well I can add "hard drives dying" to that list.

So how to go about this chore which is the most effective and the least painful to implement? There are many different ways:

1) Backing to another HDD in the same system

This is the low pain and medium cost solution. But this has the highest chance of risk of losing your originals and backup. Still, this is what I use as my daily day-to-day backup plan. I have two physical hard drives on my system. I have the original "Photos" folder in one drive and then I use the excellent and free SyncBack SE software from 2BrightSparks. SyncbackSE is far better than Windows XP backup because it just synchronizes two directories. Recovery of the archive is simple because it is almost an exact copy of your original photos directory structure. Some might argue backups should be compressed. However, images do not compress very well and it is not worth the extra CPU effort to do this process. I set up SyncBack SE to back up about 3 days in a week at 2 AM in the night and things happen automagically!

More recent advances in SATA technology allow things like RAID striping where one HDD is mirrored for redundancy with another. Although this seems like a cool thing, I am not too thrilled with the dependency on things that one cannot verify. So I am giving this a pass. Besides I hardly want to make my Windows directory with all its cruft backed up as well.

2) Backing to a DVD

This is a pain to do, relatively cheap, but has good chance of surviving any damage to your originals. Especially if your originals are stored safely elsewhere. However, I am hesitant on recommending this solution as a the only backup strategy simply because the longevity of the DVD disks is yet to be proven. This has to be combined with either strategy in (1) or (2) to be robust.

The one downside of working with DVD disks are their somewhat limited capacity. About 4.5 GB for single layer and twice that for dual layer. This can fill up fast if you shoot RAW with a digital SLR. I am waiting for the next generation DVD drives, either blue ray with more than 50 GB capacity or HD-DVD which is about 25 GB.

[A side note: I am disgusted by the bickering between HD-DVD vs BlueRay. Most of it is posturing. The customer appears to be the loser in the long run. ]

Ok, back to the topic. To help make it easier to backup to DVDs a good image management system is required. Read my other article on some helpful tips on Digital Image Management.

3) Backing to a network drive

This is becoming popular where the process is similar to (1) but is done to a hard disk drive over the network. There are many new devices that appear to do this from HDD companies. These devices usually go under the name of NAS (Network Attached Storage). Other Linux based devices like Mirra Personal Server are also available. These are fairly attractive, but it is far cheaper to setup a PC as a file server in the network to do this function.

However, backup over the network is slow. Note: Syncback SE can work with network drives as well.

So thats my thoughts on back up. Do you have favorite methods that beats the above methods hands down? Please let me and others know! Thanks for Sharing!