Several years ago, I had a hard-drive crash and I lost about 5 years of photos. Since then, I have realized that of all the digital content I have, the only files that really can't be recreated, are pictures and videos. So, for the last couple of years, I have had a system in place to protect those digital pictures, all 25,000+ of them!
This article is intended to show you ONE way of backing up data to protect against the most common issues.
I bet most of you have your photos and such on a single hard-drive inside your family computer. You are really living on the edge. You must assume that hard-drive will crash at some point. There are other threats, too. Your house could burn down, be swept away by a tornado, or your well meaning spouse could "clean up all those old pictures."
Before I tell you how my system was tested recently, I will tell you how I protect my most critical files.
How it Works
The pictures are born in my digital camera (duh) and live on the memory card. Lets call the picture, "Ted." So, I really LOVE my picture Ted, but there is only one copy of him... on the memory card in my camera. If I am out of town, and have my notebook computer, I will copy Ted to my notebook. Now I have two copies. My camera would have to fall in the river, AND my notebook would have to have a melt down to lose Ted. I'm pretty safe in this temp condition. I can't leave Ted on my camera forever cause I need the room for more pics. I should tell you, I used to delete Ted from my camera every night after coping him to my notebook while traveling. That was great until my hard drive crashed while on the road (something to do with red wine and computer parts not being compatible.)
Anyway, so once Ted get's home, here is what happens. Ted is moved to an external hard drive which I plug into my notebook. Now, there are 3 copies of Ted. (On camera, on notebook hard drive, and on external drive.) This external drive is my 'working drive' cause it holds ALL of my digital files and I use it daily for editing, sorting, etc.
Next I open Photoshop Elements Organizer which I use to index all of my 25,000 photos. (I tried Lightroom, but just didn't need it or its high price tag.) At that time, Elements meets Ted and learns all about him; things such as his birthdate, keywords, etc. But, Elements doesn't make a copy of Ted, it just knows where to find him, which is on the external hard-drive. I know, Ted also lives on the camera and the hard-drive of my notebook, but Elements ignores those copies.
Now the magic happens! Every night, with no action by me, my notebook looks at all new files generated since the previous night and uploads them to my iDrive (www.idrive.com) account! iDrive is a cloud-based storage company who I have hired to keep Ted safe. So, my computer sends both the copy of Ted on my notebook and the copy of Ted on the external-drive to it's server out on the internet. I have no idea where the server actually lives, and I don't care. Even though there are technically two copies of Ted on iDrive, I only consider it one copy. At this point, I delete Ted off my camera (so I can take more pics) and I delete him off the hard-drive of my notebook. My notebook hard-drive isn't big enough to be a permanent home for Ted (and all his brothers and sisters). There are now still two copies of Ted; one on the external hard-drive and one on iDrive. This could be considered a reasonable backup plan.
But, we aren't done. Once a month or so, I go to my underground tornado shelter and get another external-hard-drive. After plugging it into my notebook computer, I open Elements and instruct it to do a full backup to this new hard-drive. Remember that Elements is software that has knowledge of Ted and all his siblings and helps me organize my 25,000 photos. So, Elements then copies Ted (and all siblings) to the new drive. At this point, there are 3 copies of Ted; my working external hard-drive, iDrive (internet), and another external hard-drive in my tornado shelter.
This is essentially a three legged-stool. I can have a failure of any two systems, and should be able to recover Ted by the third system.
How it almost Didn't Work
So, life was good. Ted is safely backup in three places. BAM! My working external-hard drive suddenly FAILS! This is the most used and abused drive, so you sort of expect it to be the one to wear out. I didn't panic. Without getting too technical, I learned that the hard-drive itself was ok, but rather the case that sits on my desk and hooks to my computer was the problem. This should be an easy fix because Ted was still alive on the drive, just having trouble getting to him. Road block... the manufacturer decided it was a good idea to use a weirdo system to run the case/hard-drive so long story short, the data was useless. Ted was there, but locked up to never be seen again. PS, Never buy a HP Media Vault.
I have two copies left of Ted. One on iDrive, and one in my tornado shelter. I have to use these two copies to build a new working hard-drive which plugs into my notebook.
There are some differences in these two backups. I needed to restore 25,000+ photos. That is a LOT of data! The copy of Ted in the tornado shelter was going to be much faster because the internet is much slower than a hard drive plugged into my notebook. Problem was, I hadn't done that backup for about 3 weeks. So, I had to restore the Elements copy to a new working hard-drive which got me restored to the last time I did the back up. Then, I had to use iDrive to download the remaining pictures. Downloading from the internet took about 4 days! Eventually, I had the drive restored. It was a lot of work!
You see, this shows how a single backup is probably not the best idea. It was redundancy that saved the day. I am considering making a daily backup of my working external hard-drive if I can find an way to do it. iDrive is great, but SLOW for recovery. They do offer a system where they can mail you CD's of your data which is a good idea, too.
I would be interested in your backup ideas, too!
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