Tech Corner: Photographers, Backup Your Work!

Top 5 reasons to backup your work:

• Just Because!
• Your computer is less likely to die if you have a backup (Murphy’s Law)
• Redundancy is your friend
• Hard drives die – all the time
• It takes over night to do a solid backup – it takes between 3-5 days to find out that you can’t recover anything from a dead hard drive.

I recently lost 3+ shoots because I foolishly didn’t backup.  Fortunately for myself I made optical backups of the final products from two of the shoots and have 1/2 of a third shoot on the CF card still.

Lessons Learned:

1. Backup your files as soon as you unload them from your CF card
2. Backup your files as soon as you are done tagging and sorting them
3. Back up your files nightly when you are going through your edits
4. After you finish editing a session, shoot or trip backup your finished copies onto a CD/DVD to preserve optical redundancy and backup to an external hard drive
5. Find an online backup service for safetys sake with the idea of ‘off site’ backup.  In case of fire, flood or alien attack you’ll have a backup halfway across the…well at least it will be somewhere else

It’s just foolish to not backup.

Internet Based Off Site Backup Services

Here are some off site online backup services:

• Carbonite – review – site – $50/year
• iDrive – review – site – $50/year
• SOS Online Backup – review – site – $50/year
• eSureIt – review – site – $2.99/GB/Month

The trick is to keep hard drive backups of your files at home and at work or at a family members house and to keep only your most critical and time sensitive files on the online backup – like between big hard drive backups.

I have yet to use any of these backup services but I will pick one before the month is out.

Photo credit: gee whiskey via flickr by use of the Creative Commons