Backup for Photographers

Photographic Backup's

If your images mean a great deal to you, then they mean enough to make sure you can’t loose them easily. If you earn money from your images, backup isn’t something that you casually think about, its something that makes you sit down and work out an entire workflow plan in case the worst happens. If you fall into the second category, the worst happening isn’t just annoying things like your computer crashing or the hard drive failing.You also have to plan

for if the premises you work from burns to the ground, your equipment is stolen or your hard drive and local backup both fail at the same time among other things. Depending on where you fit into all of this, some of the below may be of use to see how somebody else goes about it, but no matter what you need to consider it. As you may already know if you’ve seen the computer page, I work from Apple computers so an item or two maybe slightly different if you are using Windows but for the most part the plan wouldn’t change much at all.

I’ll start by listing the various types of technology I use and then explain how they fit into the way I work. I have a 500GB internal hard drive on my workstation, two 750GB FW800 drives, two 1TB gigabit ethernet drives, one 750GB FW400 drive, one 320GB USB2 hard drive and an account with JungleDisk. Whilst photographic content is the most important asset to backup, its not the only thing to concern yourself with. Think about all the contacts, calenders, documents, pdf information packets, and the thousands of other items sitting in your documents folder and what you’d have to do were they suddenly gone - its just unimaginable. Since Apple released OS X.5 Leopard we have had access to a useful utility called Time Machine. It may not be the most comprehensive application, but its great for most items on your computer and since updating the workstation I have bought a FW400 750GB drive devoted to Time Machine. As you may already know, it updates your backup every hour of every day in the background which makes it very useful. I need to add however, that I have excluded the pictures folder on my Mac as I have another plan already in place and I don’t want it updating shots I’m going to delete from Lightroom before I’ve had a chance to get rid of them. In addition, because I have so much data that I simply cannot take a chance with in my Documents folder, I also have the dot Mac Backup application backing up those files to the 1TB network drives in a building at the end of the property.

Photographic files get treated differently. I have an automator action that copies the files automatically from the digital memory card and puts them in a folder with todays date and camera model. These files go straight onto one of the 750GB FW800 drives connected to the computer. I then run an automator action which syncs the two 750GB FW800 drives so I have an immediate backup of the files. Lightroom is the next step, so the files are imported and I go through them once doing a brutal kill of any images that I know I’m not going to want. The rest I press 1 through 5 depending on how good the image is almost without thinking about it to give me a gut reaction, that way I can sort them by rating when I go through them thoroughly the next day - always leave it a day for critical viewing as I find I’m much more objective.

I’ve now deleted the images I know I wont be keeping, so I sync the two FW800 drives again to make sure I have two copies on the computer in addition to the digital memory card which still contains the images until formatted just before the next job. At 9pm every night, the dot mac Backup application backs up one of the FW800 drives to the gigabit networked 1TB drives located in another building. Its done then as depending on the number of images taken, it can slow the network for up-to 30 minutes.

The final step happens at 2:30am every night. I wanted a copy of the most recent 3 months worth of images in a different location entirely. There are many companies offering online backup services now such as Mozy and Mamut. All I would say here is make sure you look carefully into what they are offering. Unlimited backups sound good, but there is always a cost and I’d rather stick with a company I feel is going to be around for a while. After much consideration, I decided on JungleDisk. You pay for the software which works on both Mac & Windows and then you pay Amazon each month depending on how much you store online and the amount of bandwidth you’ve used. The files are actually kept on the Amazon servers, and I like that as they are a very large and well known company. I currently have about 38GB of files backed up this way using Amazon and JungleDisk’s software. The backup happens at 2:30am because I want it updated with the new files every night but I also don’t want it monopolizing my internet connection during the day. In addition, since the internet tends to be quieter overnight, the speeds you get tend to be a little better. Speaking of internet speed, I think I should mention here that your happiness with the service will likely depend a little on your internet connection. The first backup you preform using the service will likely be huge, but after that they tend to be much faster as its just adding any new files you’ve taken that day or week depending on how you have it setup. I have the fastest internet connection I could find here which turned out to be 24Mb down and 2.5Mb up - the up being the more important of the two numbers in this instance. The first upload took me over two days, but since then it takes only minutes per night and I feel its well worth the peace of mind as I’d be able to download my files and start again no matter where I ended up in the world after even a dramatic event here.

If you are counting, you’ll notice I’ve left out one drive which is the USB2 unit. I still have some backups on there from when I was using a Windows machine. Although its plugged into the Mac, I don’t use it often now and its fallen out of rotation for my backups due to its relatively small size and slower USB2 speed. Depending on if you’re an individual backing up personal precious memories or you work for a studio with 10 photographers, your needs may be very different as the backup has to be secure enough but scaled to your needs, its certainly not a one size fits all situation. Hopefully after reading how one person backs up his photographic workstation it will give you an idea and perhaps will help you develop your plan so you’ll be ready when that one image you really need is nowhere to be found - because it will happen at some point and to some degree according to Mr Murphy’s law.