Backup your Photos
I can’t think of anything worse than the idea of losing the tens of thousands of images that I have captured over the years. My gut gets tight even thinking of the idea. Luckily for me, I have what I consider to be a fantastic backup strategy. Professional photographers are much better at this than most people, but it is important for everyone to have a backup plan for your photos. Really, this should apply to any important data, but as a photographer my images are one of the most important things on my computer. So I’ll discuss what it means to backup your data and some different backup options. Keep reading to find out more.
What it means to backup your data?
Backing up your data means that it is on two physically different hard drives that are not in the same computer. In other words, if your photos/data are stored on a hard drive in your PC, then the backup must be stored on a second hard drive that is not normally connected to that same PC. This will ensure that your data is always stored in more than one location. If one of the hard drives goes bad, then the other hard drive still has your data. The more drives that store the same data, the more secure the data will be. So if you add a 3rd or 4th drive to your backup solution, there is even less of a chance that the data will ever be lost.
What type of hard drives can I use to backup my data?
Any hard drive can do the job. It can be another computer, an external hard drive, or NAS (network attached storage). The important thing is that your backup drive not be connected to the same PC as the source hard drive on a regular basis. If you need to connect it to do your backup, that is fine. Just don’t leave it connected all the time.
Why can’t the backup hard drive be in the same computer?
The reason you want to make sure the backup drive is not physically connected to the same PC as the primary drive is to avoid loss of data due to a power surge or virus corruption. If the drives are always connected to the same PC, then they could both be irreparably damaged. By having the hard drive connected to different PCs, it will avoid a power surge from the power supply. I even keep each of my backup solutions on different battery back/surge protectors to try and minimize damage from a power surge in the house. Also, keeping them connected separately also greatly reduces the chances of spreading a virus from one drive to another. That said, it is important to make sure that any PC on your home network has proper anti-virus software to avoid spreading viruses.
What is RAID?
RAID can do a couple of things. First, it is a way to make sure your data is redundant. This means that it writes your data to more than one hard drive so that your data is stored in two places. This is called mirroring. So if you have two hard drives, drive 1 would hold your data and drive 2 would mirror all of that same data. This solution typically improves the read speed of the drive since it can read from both drives at once. This process is referred to as RAID 1. Second, RAID can make your computer see multiple hard drives as one large hard drive. If you have two 500GB hard drives, your computer can see them as a single 1000GB hard drive (this is also called 1TB). The data is then equally distributed across the different hard drives. This is called striping, and RAIDs that are striped are also called RAID 0 (zero). The problem with this setup is that if one hard drive fails, you lose all your data. You can also combine RAID 0 and RAID 1 to do both striping and mirroring. This is called RAID 10. To do this, you need at least four hard drives, so you can see how this can start to cost a lot of money. But RAID 10 provides some level of redundancy, speed, and space.
To help come up with a more efficient form of RAID, someone developed RAID 5. In RAID 5, the amount of hard drive space available is maximized by only allowing redundancy for a single drive failure. So as an example, if you have three 500GB hard drives in a RAID 5 setup….you will have 1000GBs (1TB) of space available. The data that your write to the drive is striped across all of the hard drives and each hard drive is then backed up to another drive in the RAID. This can sound very confusing, but in short….if one of the hard drives in the RAID dies, then you can still access the RAID. And when you replace the defective hard drive the RAID will backup the data to the new drive so that you maintain your redundancy. To maintain 1TB of space and still have redundancy in RAID 10, you would have needed four hard drives. So RAID 5 now saves you one extra hard drive, or you can use that 4th hard drive to add another 500GB of space to your RAID.
That said, I don’t expect the average person to take a PC and add 4-5 hard drives to build a RAID. But there are a number of hardware solutions that offer RAID and it’s important to understand how it fits into your backup plan.
What are some of these hardware RAID solutions?
My personal favorite is made by a company called Drobo. I have one of their small four hard drive units connected to my iMac. These have both USB 2.0 and Firewire 800 connections available on them. They have a new upgraded model that has space for a 5th hard drive and provides an eSATA connection for much faster transfer speeds than either USB or Firewire. You can buy the model like mine with no hard drives for about $300. The new eSATA model is still about $800. They also carry Pro versions that offer space for eight hard drives starting at $1500 with no drives included. These will also connect directly to a GigE network and provide very fast transfer speeds to all computers on the network as an NAS. These are far more expensive than I am willing to pay as a consumer, but are excellent solutions for any small business with large data needs.
There are other, more consumer-driven NAS devices that can also be used. Most every hard drive manufacturer has their own version of NAS. Just read the specs closely to make sure that it will deliver what you want from the product.
Is it OK to use only RAID for backup?
The answer is NO. It goes against my first rule of not having the hard drives connected to the same PC all the time since, as explained earlier, a power surge or virus could wipe out all the drives at once. Also, your RAID could become corrupt and then you would not be able to access anything. RAID is an excellent solution for preventing any downtime in the event of a single drive failure and an excellent addition to any backup plan to ensure more redundancy, but it should not be your only backup strategy.
What about protection against fire or flood?
Call me a gambler, but I don’t worry about this. If I lived in a flood plain then I might, but I don’t. I just consider most of these to be acts of God, and I will gamble that I will not be affected by one of these. That said, if you want to make sure that this is not an issue, I would include an offsite storage solution. If you are only worried about fire or live in a flood plain, storing a backup drive at your work or in a safety deposit box might be a good solution. If you live in an area that might be hit by a hurricane or wild fires, then this would depend on the proximity of your work or bank to your home. Your best bet is to keep your solution as far away as possible so that both your home and your offsite backup are not affected by the same catastrophe.
What about online backup?
Online backup is a great idea for those who want to keep an extra backup in as secure a place as possible. Most companies that specialize in data backup keep their servers in the most statistically unlikely places to be hit by any form of natural disaster. A professional photographer friend of mine uses a company called livedrive.com. They cost $10 a month and have unlimited storage. He has been very happy with them. If you are going to use an online storage company, make sure that is their specialty. I would not trust free or small fee sites like Flickr to be your online storage solution.
Is there a way to backup my data automatically?
There are many ways to do this. I use a program called SuperDuper on my Mac to backup my photos. It runs a backup once every other day. You can schedule it to run as often as you like. For Mac users, you can also use the Time Machine utility built into OSX 10.5 or higher to backup your entire PC to an external drive or Time Machine capsule. Again, since I don’t like to leave an external drive connected to the Mac all the time I would choose to backup to the Time Machine capsule or have another solution in tandem to the external hard drive (this is why I use SuperDuper). For PC, Windows 7 has a pretty awesome backup function built into the operating system (OS). You can backup the entire PC or just specific folders to any PC or network device accessible by the computer you are backing up. My best suggestion for anything older than Windows 7 is to upgrade your OS to Windows 7. It is the most superior Windows OS that I have ever seen, and more than worth the money to buy a new copy if you are married to the Windows platform.
What type of backup solution do you use?
As I mentioned before, I have a Drobo that I keep connected to my iMac. It keeps my photos, personal videos, and other important documents. The Drobo uses a RAID solution that is similar to RAID 5, so the Drobo remains accessible even if one of the four hard drives fails. Most RAID setups require that all hard drives be the same size, but Drobo uses a special version that allows you to use different size hard drives. So I have 1.24TB of space using three 500GB drives and one 400GB drive. A strange combo, I know, but it was what I had around the house when I put it together. Then every other day I use SuperDuper to backup the entire Drobo to my server. My server is running a version of RAID 5 developed by Sun Microsystems called RAIDZ. It has six 1TB hard drives in RAIDZ for a total of 4.4TB of space. I actually backup all of my computers in the house to the server, not just my photos. It also holds all of my media (music & movies) that I access through my network.
With my setup, I have redundancy for a single drive failure for both the Drobo and the server. I also have a copy of all my important data sitting on both at all times. So if either the Drobo or the server were to completely die, then I still have all my data.
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