Backing Up Your Photograph Collection

Should I Be Backing up My Collection of Images?

The simple answer is YES of course you should, how many people do you know who have lost information from computers when their hard disk drive (HDD) has failed. Also please don't think that because you have a fancy new Solid State Drive (SSD) that this won't fail either, I replaced a SSD in a computer because it had failed just the other day. ALL storage devices will fail, the question is, when?

here's a scenario that you may be familiar with, you have your fancy new camera gear and you've utilised the family computer to start storing and post processing your images. you may even have bought a new computer for the task but the risk is just about the same. You've just got back from your holidays and you've uploaded those excellent once in a lifetime holiday snaps and you close down the computer and will edit them tomorrow.

Tomorrow arrives and you hit the power button to be confronted with a black screen with the words 'System Disk Missing' or 'No Hard Disk'. So you call the support line at Apple, Dell or HP etc. and they confirm that you have a Hard Disk failure. Depending on your support you may have to send the computer back to the manufacturer or they send out an engineer and they replace the faulty disk drive. You excitedly boot up the computer and then it hits you, where are my images? Well they are on the old disk on its way back to your computer supplier and more than likely the data isn't recoverable anyway and if it was the charges are around $1,000 or more depending on how much data you have.

And what's your computer suppliers take on this "sorry mate, we don't guarantee your data, that's your responsibility".

So what do you do?

The simple answer is, you backup.

With an inexpensive USB external drive and some free software from the internet you can setup a backup system on your computer that will at least give you 99% of your images back in the event of a disaster. Provided, (there's always a catch) that the backup hasn't suffered the same fate as your computer. Now two hard disks failing at the same time is highly improbable but it can happen but, what is a more likely scenario is  both have been stolen or you have suffered a fire and the computer and USB drive have both melted. If this is the case then you might have well not bothered to backup at all.

So what do you do?

Make an effort and do the whole thing properly, this is what I do.

I have a 1TB drive in my computer dedicated to storing images so I have four (yes four) 1TB backup drives. The first backs up my images, Lightroom Catalogue, GPS tracks, Bridge Keywords etc. It does this at 11PM every evening. I also have two monthly drives that backup everything on the last day of the month and they alternate months so one has Jan, Mar, May, Jul, Sep, Nov and the other has the other months. All of these backups are managed automatically by a free backup program available on the internet called 'FBackup'. I also have a backup that runs whenever I feel it needs to be updated and that device is kept in my office drawer at work and taken home to be updated whenever required.

The last drive is the most important because whilst the other drives are instantly accessible, the one in my drawer at work is the drive that gets me my images back when as disaster has occurred and I've had to replace my computer.

I hope this helps

Dave Sumner