Epic Edits

Here’s a quick piece of advice taken from an old fable: Slow and steady wins the race. This moral, or saying, can be applied to many facets of photography (and everyday life).

Backing up photos is one of the most critical (ongoing) tasks for photographers, both amateur and professional. The “computer age” has been a blessing, allowing us to store and share huge amounts of digital photos. But that blessing has created the need to protect those delicate digital files, and many people have learned the consequences of not doing so.

I’ve really been dragging this series out — so far we’ve talked about all the major types of hardware, and the last article talked about software. Now it’s time to put it all together and set a strategy. It’s important to make a plan of attack when it comes to backing up photos, and this includes things like hardware choices, software choices, amount of redundancy, storage locations, schedule, and more.

We’ve talked extensively about backup hardware, but that’s just one part of a total backup solution. Software is important too — it allows you to manage multiple backup devices, schedules, and file revisions. Each software package offers different features, and each photographer had different requirements, so it’s best to do your homework before picking a backup software.

Online file hosting services offer you the ability to upload your files (photos) to their system, while giving you the opportunity to download your stored files when needed. Some services are directly aimed at photographers, while others are more general and appeal to a wider audience. In this article, we cover the basics for online backups.

After posting the Photo Backup: DVD and Photo Backup on DVD: Love or Hate articles, we had a lot of reader comments and discussion about this medium. I realize many of the readers don’t check on the comments section days or weeks after the article is published, so I wanted to follow up the two articles with some new thoughts and insights on DVD backups.

The DVD backup is a method that people tend to either love or hate. I personally feel that it’s a great method for backing up photos. There are plenty of format and capacity options out there, and some of them can be dirt cheap. In this article we’ll go over the basics of optical recordable discs, how to use them for backups, some strengths and weaknesses, and lots of little tips along the way.

A RAID tower is a collection of two or more internal hard drives housed in a box that contains special RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks) hardware/software, and connects to your computer as if it were a single external hard drive. These towers can be utilized as a working drive or a backup drive, depending on your needs. In either case, the tower is designed to protect your data from hard drive failures (typically one disk can fail and you’ll still be able to recover your data).

An external hard drive is simply an internal drive that is housed in some type of case and connected to your computer via external data cables. Some external drives require auxiliary power, while others are powered by the data connection (such as some compact USB 2.0 drives). External drives serve as good backup hardware because of their storage capabilities and portability.

An internal hard drive is simply a hard drive housed within your computer case and attached to its power and data connections. All computers have at least one internal drive to run the operating system, but an internal backup drive is one separate from your main drive. Simply creating a copy of your data on the same hard drive won’t give you much data protection. On that same note, most computers have more than one power supply cable and hard drive data connection, so installing a second, third, or even fourth drive should be no problem.