Storing your memories… in aCoolDryPlace

I briefly thought about adding “storing your memories” as a tag line to the header until I realise quite how cheesy it was.  And it might, or might not, give you a clue to my on going competition to win a free portrait shoot by guessing “why aCoolDryPlace?” This article isn’t going to help in the slightest on that front.

If you book me as your wedding photographer, you will want to know that when you get home from honeymoon I will still have all your wedding photos. Keeping your photos safe is important. In this post I thought I would share what I do to keep both my professional and my personal photos safe, and offer you some advice of fairly inexpensive back up solutions for use at home. I am going to assume digital photos are the order of the day, since most photography, both amateur and professional/wedding has gone that way. Film is an altogether different monster.

Warning: This article is very geeky. Please don’t take apart your computer unless you know what you are doing! Contact me if you are desperate for a little help. Contact a professional support service if you are in need of a LOT of help!

Harddrives fail!

I know from personal experience that harddrives fail. Assuming anything else is to take a risk. Copying to CD/DVD is often thought of as a straightforward approach, but you’ll quickly end up with a lot of Cd/DVDs and be unable to find anything. CD/DVDs also fail given time, not that I’ve experienced that yet. The simplest back up solution is to get a second harddrive, whether internal to the computer, or an external USB harddrive.The problem with this approach is remembering to copy everything onto the second harddrive, and keeping it consistent with the main harddrive. Backup software can help with that, but a hardware solution should be more reliable. RAID (Redundant array of inexpensive disks), more specifically RAID 1, enables you to set up two physical drives as if they are a single harddrive in the computer. The hardware (hardware raid is a better bet than software raid) automatically copies everything to both disks. If one disk fails, it can be replaced and all the data on the surviving on copied across to restore the redundacy. Some computers’ motherboard‘s have that feature built in, or you can get a PCI RAID card to do the job. I used an internal RAID solution for quite some time until I needed to upgrade harddrives and ran out of space in my machine. I’m now using a network RAID box so that multiple computers can access the photos in my home network.

Houses burn down!

Having a backup readily available at home is great, but what if my house burns down or some not so friendly individual steals my computer when I’m away? It is important to also have a backup offsite. For some people paying a service like Flickr to store their important photos should be sufficient. Personally I don’t have the broadband bandwidth to upload so much data, and I have opted to have a removeable harddrive rack in my computer. From time to time I can bring the harddrive from its secret storage location, backup everything, and return it to that location (your parents house is always a good place to store stuff!). Backups aren’t as frequent, but most of my data will be safe in the event of a disaster at home. There are network solutions available which enable you to host a box offsite to upload data too, but you’d need a very good internet link.

Having the original and two backups is a fairly standard approach to managing this risk. More backups would be safer, but less manageable, and it is very unlikely that both my home and offsite backups will fail at the same time.

On the job backup

For added peace of mind, I also have a photo drive to allow me to back up my memory cards while out on the job. This means that I have at least one backup of any really important photos (like wedding photos) prior to getting home.

Recommendations for the non-professional

For the non-professional photographer I would still recommend the double backup solution for keeping your memories safe. And the backups should be stored at different locations. The links above are to example products and not ones I have tried or necessarily recommend. I’m not going to make a precise recommendation because the best solution for you will very much depend on your technical skill, number of photos, and financial situation. As an initial solution you probably can’t go too far wrong with keeping a backup on Flickr. They don’t guarantee your data’s safety (other online services will), but I don’t think they’ll loose it in a hurry, and you can share your photos with the world (if you want to they can also be kept private). And when you sign up you might get 3 months free which you can give as a gift, to a friend, or to me perhaps!