The Importance of Backups - Part II

So yesterday I was talking about backups and the reason is because I just don't think that with all the technology people use these days they give enough attention to making sure it's safe. I see a lot of people just filling up their hard drives with year after year of baby pictures, birthdays, vacations, graduations, weddings...the list goes on. But I rarely see anyone being proactive and backing up those images regularly. It's a simple fact that hard drives will fail, and when that time comes, you need a Plan B!

For Plan B it's pretty easy and you've got two basic options. One is to back up to an external hard drive, and the other is to burn copies to CDs or DVDs. Just go to Best Buy or any other store that sells electronic items and look for their computer section. A spindle of 50 DVD's will probably be around $20. Each DVD holds 4.7GB of data. You'll find external hard drives in sizes as little as 80GB on up to 1TB or more in storage space. The more you need, the more you pay, but generally for external hard drives you'll pay around $0.25 per GB of space. That's really not a lot of money. If you can afford the digital camera and camcorder, chances are you can probably scrape together enough for a spindle of DVD's or an external hard drive.

Burning a copy of your pictures to a CD or DVD is pretty straightforward, and if you aren't sure how, I guarantee your kids do. For large amounts of data it's just easier for me to use external drives. CD's and DVD's work fine, I just don't have the patience to switch a bunch of discs in and out. For external hard drives, they pretty much all come with at least a USB 2.0 port, and if you've purchased one in the last 5 years, chances are it has Firewire 400. They are about the same in terms of performance. Some of the newer machines have Firewire 800, which just allows you to transfer data faster. In the end they all do the same thing. For the fastest transfer speeds possible, look for an eSATA connection. You'll probably have to get a special card installed in your computer, but if you want the absolute best performance, that's where it's at.

When you plug in your external hard drive to your computer, it will show up as another drive letter (Windows users) or be mounted under devices (Mac users). I would recommend downloading all your images to one folder and your videos to another. Both Windows and Mac do this by default, but the point is to have one high level place they all reside in. This way you aren't hunting all over your hard drive when you want to find something, and it makes it easy to know which folder(s) to backup.

To actually backup the files there are two methods: 1) The easy way - find some good backup software or 2) Manually copy all your files from your local hard drive to your external hard drive or CD/DVD. A lot of the external hard drives these days come with backup software. All you need to do is install it on your machine and tell it what folders to back up.

That's about it. It's not rocket science, it's just a good habit to get into to so you're prepared when the hard drive on your computer "bytes" the dust. That was bad, I know. Unless both drives die at the same time, you will always have at least one copy somewhere.

As for us, well 2 copies isn't enough. We have two internal hard drives, so everything that gets downloaded is automatically backed up on the other. (Time Machine rocks!) We've also got a 2TB external hard drive connected via Firewire 800 port that actually has 2 separate hard drives inside, 1TB each. Once all the images are downloaded inside the computer, we copy them over to this external hard drive as well. The neat thing about this one is that it is configured to use RAID 1. This is just a fancy way to make your data redundant. All it means is that the two drives inside this unit automatically mirror each other, so everything we copy is immediately mirrored on both drives.

So at any one time, we actually have 4 copies of our images on 4 separate hard drives. This is all great until something really catastrophic happens...In which case there is a 5th copy of all the images on another external hard drive. This one is actually stored at an offsite location, so that if something really bad happens and kills all 4 copies in our studio (fire, tornado, etc.) we still have a way to restore everything.

Sorry for such a long post, but I just wanted to bring up the topic because I've seen so many people who are one bad storm away from disaster. Which brings up another point -- always use a surge protector! By taking some simple steps to make a second copy of all your images it can save a lot of headache down the road.

Thanks! Now go out and back up your pictures already!