Union Hoe and Fork, Frankfort, NY, August 2012

“Be Prepared” – Backing Up Your Photos and Data

The time is now to back up your photographs. I can’t emphasize this enough.

Why do you need to develop the habit of backing up your data?

  • Hard drives do not last forever. It’s not a matter of if but when a hard drive will fail. If you are lucky, a hard drive will start making funny noises before it fails, but not always!
  • Your computer data could become corrupted by a virus.
  • You could have a fire or other disaster at your home.

You are just one hard drive crash away from Digital Oblivion! Don’t let this happen to you. There are steps you can take starting today. Are you prepared? Do you have a back-up routine? Or are you intimidated by unfamiliar technology?

“Industry Best Practice” in backing up invokes the “3-2-1 Rule”: three copies of your data, on two different media, with one copy stored off-site. The first is your Main Photo Library, which lives either on your computer or on an external hard drive. The second copy is on an external hard drive and usually is near your computer. This is called a “local” backup. The third copy is either another external hard drive kept off-site, or cloud storage.

I recommend backing up to at least one external hard drive. The Western Digital line of drives are reliable (starting around $70 for 1TB). You should purchase a drive that is at least twice as big as your computer’s hard drive if you are backing up everything. Both Mac and Windows have excellent built-in backup utility tools, so you may not need to purchase software. (That said, on my Mac, instead of Time Machine, I use an excellent and inexpensive program called Carbon Copy Cloner [Mac only]). Regarding cloud backup, if you have an Amazon Prime account you get unlimited photo storage included with your account. An excellent, reasonably-priced and intuitive-to-use option is BackBlaze. Many of the long-established photo-sharing sites, SmugMug and flickr to name two, have expanded into cloud storage. Google Photos is a bit clunky on the upload and tends to strip metadata, but allows for sharing and co-editing. In any case, I’ll do my best to find the most cost-effective solutions for you. Many of these services will sync with your Photo Library too. There are pros and cons to syncing which we can discuss.