A great benefit of digital photography is that the original files can easily be duplicated and are therefore safe from catastrophe. That’s the claim, and for the most part it’s true. The flaw is that if digital files are not managed well, they’re quite fragile. In many tedious film vs. digital debates, film nuts claim that a negative will never be destroyed by a failed hard drive and the digital zealots claim they can make as many copies as they want, so there!
Both groups are wrong, or at least overly optimistic. Film negatives die in fires and and digital files are frequently left to die on fragile drives. I’m mostly in the film camp. Prints and negatives in a shoe box will be viewable indefinitely with no further interaction or requirements other than the box and some light. Many digital files are going to be lost because they’re not backed up or the computer is thrown away or otherwise lost. Digital files don’t survive inaction. It’s the inaction part that puts your photos at risk.
I shoot primarily on film, so I should have original negatives of all my photos for a very long time. Just put them in a binder and I’m done. I also scan every frame so I have an easily shareable digital copy. Film storage is easy and pretty foolproof. Digital file storage on the other hand only appears foolproof, so here’s what this fool does.
What I do for backups
Film scans and digital photos are ingested simultaneously to my primary (internal) drive and an attached Drobo. Then, everything is copied nightly using Chronosync to an external drive. A second external drive serves as a Time Machine backup. This means each and every photo is in at least 4 places at all times…
- Original Negative (film only of course)
- Internal hard drive
- External media drive via Chronosync
- External drive via Time Machine
- External Drobo during ingest
The Natural Disaster Factor
You’d think I’d be covered with the above process, but it neglects to take into account the natural disaster problem. Everything above is contained in a single room. I have a fire and Poof! it’s all gone. That’s why every 6 months I make a complete backup of everything on yet another hard drive and move it offsite. I’ve only been doing this for a year, but the plan is to rotate drives so that I have a complete archive on drives in two offsite locations. It would be tragic if my house burned down and I then found that my single offsite backup was faulty. In the photo above, you can see a docked drive being filled with my photo libraries as I write this. The dock has eSata and USB interfaces. I just have to make sure to remember to copy everything forward before either of those formats are phased out.
What about “The Cloud?”
I’m a little old-fashoned. I don’t trust the cloud. As part of a backup strategy it’s great, but not as the only method. Besides, it’s horribly slow. I upload most “keeper” shots to galleries out at Zenfolio but this is more for sharing than for backup. Many folks swear by cloud storage, and it’s certainly better than nothing.
So, what’s your backup plan? You’ve got one, right? If not, get one.