In the last couple of years I’ve had more than one friend lose images due to not having it backed up adequately. I don’t understand this at all, too many people seem to overlook the fact that all hard drives will, eventually fail. I’ve had people tell me, “no problem, I put them on my external drive, they’re safe”. Having only one copy of your photos is playing with fire……and you are extremely likely to get burned. In this post, I am going to outline what I do to protect my work. It is by no means the only or best way to protect it, but it works for me and is relatively simple and painless to maintain.
Job number one is to decide where your images will reside in the first place. This will be either on your computer’s hard drive or an external drive attached to your computer. My catalog has frown to the point that my internal drive doesn’t even come close to storing all my photos so I have chosen to move all photos to an external drive attached to my computer.
Since my wife is also a photographer, I had to also look at ways to backup her stuff also so I thought that a central place to store a backup would be best in our situation. I looked at NAS (Network Attached Storage) systems but found they were rather costly. They are a housing which have multiple bays for hard drives and connect directly to your router. While reading some stuff one day, I discovered what would become my go to setup.
Being a bit of a pack-rat, I usually have an old computer or two laying around so I blew the dust off one and set it up beside my router and connected it to my router. This machine is an old Core 2 Duo, not even an “i” series of chip but for this task, you don;t need much power. My router lives in our old computer room which is going to be converted to a storage room so will be quite out of sight soon.Next go get yourself an external drive or even better, an external enclosure that you can install your own drive into. This will be a bit cheaper for you to upgrade drives if you outgrow your first one.
Next thing to think about is an app that will actually do the work of backing up for you. You could do it manually, but that leaves too much room for error. What I use is a sync program called Goodsync. Very powerful and quite cheap, I think it’s about $40 or so. The reason I use a sync program rather than a backup program is that the sync one actually analyzes both drives and only updates what has been changed. If you haven’t worked on your photos since the last backup, it does nothing. The program runs either manually or you can program it to run at whatever intervals you wish.
This setup protects me against hard drive failure nicely as the odds of two drives failing at the same time isn’t very likely. That said, you aren’t protected against theft, fire or other catastrophes so what next? Simple, buy another external drive the same size as your backup drive or bigger. Use your sync program to make another backup to this drive and keep this drive at a friend’s house or any other location other than your own home. The drive must be accessible on a regular basis for updates but since this is a security backup, I don’t update mine as often. Running a system similar to this great gives peace of mind, if you have a HD failure with your photo drive, you just replace the drive and run that backup job in reverse and your photos are re-instated on the new one.
My personal experience is that Western Digital drives have given me less failures over the years than Seagate but your mileage may vary so go with what you like. For the average person, this is all fairly inexpensive until you get into bigger drives.