Photo Backup: An Intro to Data Security
By Brian Auer • September 22nd, 2008
Backing-up your photos is definitely important, but more important is getting in the habit of doing so. As time goes on and our skills increase, we tend to take more photos. Cameras keep getting bigger and pumping out more pixels too. I recently wrote about my exponential photo collection, and this illustrates what I’m talking about. If you don’t have good habits with your backups right now, you’ll be in a world of hurt one or two years down the road.
FOLLOW THIS SERIES OF ARTICLES!
TOC — PHOTO BACKUP GUIDE
NEXT — HOW MANY PHOTO BACKUPS DO YOU HAVE?
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting articles in a series about photo backups. We’ll cover all the major methods of doing backups, including RAID towers, external hard drives, DVDs, online solutions, and more (but not necessarily in that order). At the end of the series, I’ll pull everything together in a eBook like we did with the Guide to Adobe Bridge.
To start things off, here are some articles that I’ve come across that cover various aspects of photo backups. Leave a link in the comments if you have some others in your own bookmarks.
- Backup – Wikipedia
This entry goes seriously into backup methods and the management of backups. Most of it is probably overkill for many photographers, but it’s interesting to see just how far this stuff goes. - 5 Ways To Never Lose Your Photos
Jim Goldstein presents some good solid methods for backing-up, and some things to think about while securing your photos for the long haul. - My Photo and Computer Back-up Strategy
Scott Kelby lays out his backup techniques and some of the hardware he uses to do so. - 5 Ways to Store Your Photos
Five of the basic methods and pieces of hardware for storing your photos outside of your internal hard drive. - Digital Workflow: Preserve Those Captures
If you think you’re doing enough to backup your photos, take a look at this article by Jim Talkington. From a pro’s perspective, this is all just a part of doing business. - Organize: Part 3 – Seeing it Through
Neil Creek touches on the topic of backups in this article about photo organization. - Back Up Your Files Regularly
A good reminder for doing that totally necessary thing that we hate (and sometimes forget) to do. - Back Up Your Work On the Road
An overview of portable gadgets for backing up your photos on the run. - Back Up Your Photos on DVD
The DVD backup may not be the best method of backup, but it should still be considered essential as a secondary method. - 5 Steps to Securing your Data
Backing-up is just one part of securing your data (photos). Here are some tips for additional activities you should be doing.
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from North Idaho. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
Visit the author's homepage | View all Epic Edits posts by Brian Auer
Definitely a worthwhile subject to write about, as it happens far too often that people lose all their photos (and other data) when they have a HDD failure, or get hit with a nasty worm/virus.
There are many easy ways to setup backups (and I’m sure you’ll cover most of them), so anyone who values their data and photos should definitely be looking at setting up some sort of a backup strategy.
I should get round to this. I need another drive though I think.
I need to start doing off site back ups too.
Important topic – locking forward for some hints… On the photo I see the famous “slug” – a good start to build a backup system!
It’s important to remember to backup your files offsite, too. A fire can destroy your original and local backup, but won’t touch your files if you back them up online. Compare some different services here.
Looking forward to this series Brian!
To any Mac-owning photographers out there who are using OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and HAVEN’T bought an external drive and turned on Time Machine – do it! Time Machine really is simple and painless, and it works beautifully.
Time Machine takes an incremental backup every hour, but you can always tell it to “Back up now”, especially right after you’ve uploaded a lot of photos. I use Time Machine, it has already saved my butt several times, and I sleep better at night.
well the best backup is the automated backup, setup forget it and remember it when disaster strikes.
I’m just using an external drive right now, but I’m paranoid about theft and fire. I’d be interested to learn how to get around those two issues.
Hello Brian,
Very useful articles about backup. (And blog in general is very good.) I have a question. Do you encrypt your data for backups? If a thief get a backup storage he will get all data. Personally I don’t encrypt, but it bothers me.
Thank you,
David
My choice goes to automated online backup services such as KoffeePhoto. Its photo dedicated desktop software takes care of the upload of the pictures and, if needed, the restoration of the files. Nothing to care about.
thanks for the collection of articles. and the back up you have in the pic looks pretty cool. For me, the problem with getting a lot of storage is I start dumping and not cleaning up files. I also suck at organizing them so I end up with tons of images I don’t remember where I put. Back ups are so key, but I really need to get my act together..oh well. new years resolutions! Shaw
I am relying on offsite data backup as my plan B. I am newly in charge of my company’s website, and I am using a monthly subscription backup service. All of our files are backed up automatically every day. Should there be a fire we will not lose our website.
Garret
I think we need to do it all. External hard drive, writeable disk, zip files, offline storage. You can never have too many backups in place. files are easy to recreate, but no so with photos. That moment in time will never come back. the lighting will be different if you try to do it again. Better safe now than sorry later.
I like using dvds as a means of backing up all of my photos. I only have about 10 gigs of photographs on my PC so it is really easy, if I had more I would invest in another external hard drive.
Can’t wait for the series to kick off Brian! Thanks again for everything you do!
Thanks brian for the great post. I have recently encountered a hardware/software crash that caused me to lose all photos and data stored on my hard drive. Going through that experience makes you realize that data security is probably the most important thing in some fields of work. You provided a lot of information detailing the different kinds and types of data security and I intend to use this knowledge to protect myself in the future.
This is a very important topic to write about, especially when dealing in the field of photography, where data is your livelihood. I agree with an above commenter, online data storage is the way to go. Even if your data is safe from hardware and software crashes, I have seen hard drives wipe out hundred of gigs of data. And then there are fires, earthquakes, and floods that can cause your hard drive to stop functioning. In those cases, online data store remains safe and unsusceptible to failure.