Everything photography came to a standstill for me a few days ago. Okay, I still carried my point and shoot around with me, taking snapshots, but leaving them on the memory card. I also talked to a few models about setting up shoots, making sure to plan them far enough into the future, that I could recover from the problem, that has been keeping me from uploading anything new to either Flickr or iStockphoto. The problem? The external drive that holds all my photos was about to die.
As soon as I knew it was going, which was about the time when it started dismounting itself at random and only occasionally re-mounting, I backed up everything on it to another drive, which I keep around for just this type of scenario. In fact, I make a point of not using this backup drive for anything but just that: Backing stuff up. As soon as that was done, I turned the dying drive off and left it that way, until I could get a replacement.
I ordered a new drive which arrived in the mail today (good excuse to upgrade the size as well). As I am writing this, the old drive is being copied onto the new one. Afterwards, the dying drive will be retired, or if I can somehow make it a bit more stable, maybe turned into a network drive; something not terribly important.
The point of all this is, of course, to talk about storage and backups. The problem with digital photography is that you need a place to store your files. Harddrives are cheap these days, but to be honest, I don't trust them enough to use only one. I have heard too many horrorstories for that. So, I have the second drive, which I should be putting away, every time I am done backing up, so it might not be discovered in case of a break in. In fact, I really should put the backup drive in remote storage, in case the place burned down. But I know myself well enough, that if I did that, I'd forget about it and fall behind on backing up. And that would be the exact moment of disaster, as predicted by Murphy's Law. I've tried going the dvd route in the past, but burned disks tend to lose quality, get lost, scratched and are a hassle to keep organised in the long run.
In spite of having a backup system in place (sort of), situations like having a drive die on me, still leaves me wondering if there might be a better, more reliable (yet affordable) way to safeguard my work.
Rasmus Rasmussen is on loan from iStockphoto, where he is part of the image inspection team.
