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Feb
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Posted by digitalcameras
February 19, 2008 |
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If you’ve been shooting digital pictures for a while, you’ve no doubt considered how to keep all those precious memories safe. There are a number of strategies that range in cost, convenience, and robustness. Here are a few of them that might be worth looking into.
- External hard drive: This is probably the simplest and most common way to backup your data. You just plug in any of the many external hard drives available out there and drag and drop your data. The upside is that it’s easy to do so you’re more likely to actually do it on a regular basis. Also, the price per GB isn’t too bad these days with 500GB drives just over the $100 range. One twist that I would recommend is that you keep the hard drive itself in a different place than your computer. A safety deposit box or secure location at your work place are two options. This way, if you have a fire or some other unfortunate event at home, your data is safe somewhere off site.
- DVD: This is similar to the external hard drive idea except it’s quite a bit more tedious. You also run the risk of have your DVD’s go bad by being exposed to poor environmental conditions.
- Internal redundancy: You can setup multiple hard drives in your desktop computer as a RAID 1, otherwise known as a mirror. This way, if one hard drive fails, the other will still have all your data and you can rebuild the RAID with a new drive. The great thing here is that you don’t have to do anything after the initial setup. There are also potential performance gains from this setup since the computer can read data from both disks simultaneously. Unfortunately, there can be performance hits as well since the computer needs to write data to both disks. There are other kinds of RAIDs that can provide redundancy and they are covered in other places on the web so I won’t go into it here. The downside here is that if your computer blows up, you’ll lose the entire RAID.
- Internet: Sites like mozy.com allow you to upload your files to their servers. The cost is reasonable and even free if you don’t have too much data. Plus, you get the advantage of having them be off site. It can be a bit inconvenient if you need to pull data back, but they do usually have software that takes care of uploading the latest updates you’ve made fairly frequently. The big downside with this option is that if you do have a lot of data, it can take forever to upload it all.
- Drobo or NAS: These options are expensive and can take up a lot of real estate. Also, you don’t get the opportunity to store your data off site. They do have many advantages if you’re running your own network and need to have a place for multiple users to share data, however, for most of us, this option isn’t all that appealing.
- Software backup programs: If you run Mac OSX Leopard, you can use the Time Machine feature to manage your data to another (external or internal) hard drive. There are other programs that do similar kinds of things for Windows machines, but probably not quite as easily.
So what do I do? Well, my desktop is setup as a mirrored RAID so my data is immediately backed up as I go. I also have DVD backups as well as an external hard drive that I backup to once every couple months or so. They are stored off site. Finally, I also upload all of my pictures to Flickr so at least the jpgs are backed up there. Of course, I can’t upload RAW files or any other files that aren’t jpgs so that’s only a partial solution. In any case, that makes a total of five distinct locations where I have my photos at least. Is that overkill? Maybe a little. But I also live in San Francisco, where the chance of a catastrophic earthquake is a little higher than anyone would like to see it. And a little piece of mind goes a long way when it comes to something as priceless as the pictures of your family.
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