I’ve been photographing digitally since 1996 and I still have those crude JPEG files on my computer. I’ve been pretty good about keeping backups of my systems. I’m not obsessive about it, but I try not to leave too much to luck.
I subscribe to the school that a file isn’t safe until it is in at least 3 places. Like a lot of people I’ve been running with the technology train: floppy drives, Zip drives, writable CDs, writable DVDs… Actually, come to think of it, I don’t think I used DVDs for backup — by the time they became cost-competitive it was pretty obvious to me that they were a dead end.
Since then I’ve used multiple external hard drives to store my photographs and other files. The number of images per year increased in conjunction with increasing megapixelage of the cameras to create “gigage”. I don’t pretend that I’m unique in this regard – in fact I’m probably on the low side.
Two years ago I stopped buying external firewire drives and purchased a 2-bay Weibitech drive. This allows me to treat bare 500 gigabyte SATA hard drives as though they were oversized floppies. This was good, but I still had one flaw in my backups that was hard to overcome: local disaster (e.g., house fire, theft, flood, tornado, etc.)
To counteract that a bit I’ve stored a drive or two offsite at my sister’s house about 90 miles to the west. I figure if both our houses are destroyed by a single event that spans 3/4 the state of Massachusetts the last thing I’m going to be worrying about are my photographs. Suffice it to say this is awkward and I’m not obsessive enough to keep this system up-to-date (in fact I’m pretty sure that disk is over a year old now). Not good.
Back in my day as a software engineer we’d often talk about moving bits around and I had envisioned a system by which photographers would have mutual backup systems: Photographer A would allocate 1 or more drives for Photographer B’s photographs, and visa versa. You manage your own files (and pay for your disks), you just mutually pay for the bandwidth and electricity.
The trick here was the upstream speed needed to shoot gigabytes worth of files around. At the time DSL was king and it didn’t have the oomph needed to make this work (without paying through the nose).
Enter Verizon FiOS with nice uplink speeds and no transfer limits. Now things get interesting. Next on the horizon is a company called Backblaze which offers network backup for $5/month. I get on the waiting list for the OS X version and about a month ago I installed their software and turned the throttle up to 11…
My uplink speed is about 500 kilobytes/second so it was going to take awhile. I have over 71,000 images and a bunch of other files. Just shy of one month later all 800 gigabytes worth are safe, sound, and encrypted on some disks on the west coast. And now any new images will be immediately sent there. The sound you hear is me breathing a bit easier for the first time in 18 months or so.
To get the photographs safely stored on Backblaze I’ve deferred backing up some video projects… I need to find a way to properly manage the HUGE files HD video projects create. A lot of the bigger files amount to temporary or intermediate files and really have no reason to be clogging up my network connection. Some tweaks to the workflow are in order.
I encourage anyone with a reasonably fast network connection to consider a service like Backblaze. If your professional life doesn’t depend on digital files, at least consider the importance of your family photographs and personal documents. Unlike the photo albums of yesteryear, digital images can be copied very easily and it is this recent ability to put those copies in two or twenty places around the planet that makes them far more resilient (in some ways) than their physical cousins. Yes, yes… I’m quite aware of archiving issues… More on that some other day. Those issues should not stop you from having files properly backed up.
Speaking of archiving photographs…. is it time to convert my raw images to DNG? Hmmmm.
