Dave Block Photography

Someone asked me yesterday if I backed up my photos. The answer is a resounding “YES” so here’s a quick post about how I do my backup, and why.

Everyone knows (intellectually) that backing up your photos is important. But it’s like a lot of things that you should do (like flossing) that you do once in a while when you remember…which is bad for both your teeth and your data. Disclaimer: there are lots of passionate opinions about what hardware and what setup to use. I’m really not that interested in the speeds and feeds debate. I just want to make sure people understand why it is really, really important to do SOME kind of backup.

My setup works like this:

1) While shooting, all CF cards get dumped onto a Hyperdrive portable hard drive. (Note, I only have 1 of these, so this is a possible single point of failure in my workflow). My Hyperdrive is built with a 160 GB 3.5″ drive, so running out of memory on a shoot is highly unlikely.
2) Back in the office, everything gets downloaded to my primary PC, with original copies staying on the Hyperdrive for at least 24 hrs or longer.
3) The primary PC is configured for a nightly backup to an HP MediaSmart Server, basically a low-end PC that has 4 drive bays and comes with simple software that automates backup.

So, I have 2 or 3x redundancy on all my photos. There’s all kinds of ways to make your setup more redundant, but for my needs, this works. What’s the best thing about this setup? 1) it was not that expensive to create, 2) it was easy to set up, and most importantly, 3) the nightly backup happens automatically, so I don’t have to think about it. So what’s missing from my setup? Offsite redundancy. More about this below.

How reliable are hard drives? These days, very. The industry likes to throw around Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) as a spec, and generally the number is some huge number of hours, usually over 1 million hours (which by the way does not mean that a drive will work for 1 million hours before it fails). More meaningful is the service life of a drive, or its warranty life. Service life can be defined as the length of time a drive will operate without a signficant chance of a problem. Warranty period can be thought of as the amount of time that a company will bet money (i.e. replacement cost) that a drive will not fail. For desktop drives, for example, Western Digital offers a 5 year warranty. So generally, it’s reasonable to expect a desktop drive to last about 5 years, and a notebook drive (which operates under more demanding conditions) to go about 2-1/2 or 3 years. Anything beyond that, and you’re probably on borrowed time.

OK, so drives are great, why do I need to backup? 3 huge reasons:
1) Drives fail, all the time, no matter where they are in their service life.
2) Bad people steal computers, with all your photos on them. It happens to working professionals – a wedding shooter in Seattle had her office broken into 2 years ago and not only did she lose all her camera gear and PC equipment, she lost 2 weddings worth of photos – gear can be replaced, memories cannot. Painful if they’re your memories. Professionally disasterous if they’re someone else’s memories.
3) Fires, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, etc all happen. Not likely, but they do.

I can’t stress enough – the most important thing is make this an automatic process! Don’t rely on yourself to back up every night, because chances are it won’t happen, and failures have this sneaky way of happening just when you got a little lazy and haven’t backed up in a month or two or more. And because of #2 and #3 above, backup needs to be not just in your office, but also somewhere offsite. Either keep an external hard drive at a friend’s house, or mail DVDs to your parents once a month, use a free online service (which probably won’t be enough, once you start uploading), or subscribe to a service like Mozy or Carbonite that do online backup (these are nice because it’s all automated, again, it’s much better when your backup is fully automated).