‎104 – Backing up images like a pro versus a bonehead just went live

[Marko]

Hi members!

Just an FYI that ‎104 just went live - Thx!
Backing up images like a pro versus a bonehead | Photography.ca (http://www.photography.ca/blog/2012/02/15/backing-up-your-photography/)

[AcadieLibre]

Great idea for a podcast for something so important and so overlooked by many people. The biggest issue I would have about mailing my hard drive is it can be lost, corrupted, etc.. to me it is not worth it. I think the extra hard drive off premises is the best idea. I stick to my bank safety deposit box and it is safe, secure and the best idea I can come up with. Every 3-4 months for the cost of hosting at Amazon you can buy another external drive and have even more redundancy to a reasonable limit. The other concern with going to one of the companies that are not amazon is like what happened to Megaupload where the American feds closed it down and people are panicking over getting their info back and people may have lost everything they had there thinking it was a safe offsite storage solution. The other issue is how long will a company be in business? How financially sound are they now and down the road? Even like you are doing for now keep one or two full back ups at other locations on external drives, to me it is the safest, cheapest and best way. I think cloud computing has its purposes but not for the type of full back most people need. I also think you need to back up all your hard drive just not your photos.

[asnow]

Very good podcast Marko. If this saves even one person from the headaches you went through it was worth it.

My backup plan is;


My system consists basically of a system drive (the operating system), and a data drive (where all my pictures are)
1. I also have a separate backup drive installed in my PC. On that drive I have
a) A full image backup of the system drive done approx one a month.
b) A synctoy copy of all my images (plus any other important data files/folders). This preserves the folder structure. I manually run the utility every time I add pictures.
c) A Lightroom catalog backup done once a week

2. I have an external drive which I sync to my internal backup drive and keep offsite at work. I update this approx once a month.


This protects me from;
a) If the system drive fails, I can install a new one and restore the system from the image on the backup drive.
b) If the data drive fails I can install a new one and copy my pictures from the backup drive and restore the Lightroom catalog from my backup drive.
c) If the backup drive was to fail I can recreate that from my offsite backup.
d) The worst senario. If someone broke into my house and stole my computer, or my house burnt down etc. I would then have to purchase a new computer. As the hardware would likely be different, I would have to reinstall all software (all my software license numbers are on the backup/offsite bacup drive. I can then get all my pictures, important data files from the offsite backup.

[Marko]

good comments guys - i'll likely embed them into the blog post if that's cool.
Thx! marko