Buddhist prayer flags on a Tibetan mountain pass.
The saying goes that there are two kinds of people in the world – those that have had a hard drive failure and those that will. I had a 500GB drive fail on me yesterday. Having redundant backups is essential for the working photographer, enthusiastic amateur and anyone who wishes to make sure that there image collection remains intact.
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A backup exists to protect your data should something happen to it. Hard drive failure, fire/flood/earthquake damage, power surges, user error, viruses, theft and more are some of the potential hazards you may face. Images have lifecycles, from capture through to import/ingestion through to working/editing status through to archive. At different points in this life cycle, you may need different backups corresponding to the work you’ve done or the versions you have.
3-2-1 Rule
An easy, commonly used method for backups is the 3-2-1 rule. It is an ideal method for storage when images are in the archive stage, but may not always be possible or practical in the earlier stages. The 3-2-1 rule is
- Keep 3 copies of any important file – one primary and two as backup.
- Use 2 different forms of media – for example hard drive and optical media (DVD/CD/Bluray)
- Keep 1 copy offsite or at least offline.
Equipment Backup
Having backups for your equipment is also essential. When you are out in the field shooting, what will you do if you camera has problems? Do you have a backup body? Spare battery? Charger? Extra CF cards? Portable hard drive?
I was on a quick photographic trip to Malaysia last month. Prior to leaving, I bought a new, toughened portable external hard drive, and an extra CF card for myself, as well as an extra one for my wife. She just shoots for fun with one of my old DSLR’s but she tends to shoot a lot and wanted a new card as well. As I wasn’t planning to do any editing or cataloging of the images, I just took a small, portable Windows laptop to use for storage.
It was just as well that I bought those extra CF cards. After shooting the first day, I was transferring the images to the computer. After copying over the first 16GB card, all the USB ports on the computer stopped working. I’m still not sure why. It meant though, that I had to rely on only the CF cards for the three days we were away. Fortunately, between us we had a little over 50GB worth of cards, so it was enough for the trip, but it was a little nerve wracking only having a single copy of the images.
So make sure you employ a backup strategy in your photography. I’ll be looking more at image file backup in a future post and some possible ways to manage that.
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