Not a techie...need advice

Kruegs · Dec 31, 2013

I started getting into photography as a hobby a couple years ago when my first child was born. I currently do not have a backup system (hard drive and SD cards) and know I need to get something in place but am looking for a little advice. I was planning to get an external hard drive to free up some space on my computer and either getting a second hard drive stored off site or using a cloud option such as BackBlaze as my backup. I am not a techie at all so before buying an external hard drive and signing up for a two-year subscription to BackBlaze I thought I'd see if anyone has any suggestions, opinions, recommendations. I'd love to hear how you handle your backups as well as external hard drive brands to look at or stay away from. I'm looking to spend around $100 on a drive and around $5/month if possible for cloud storage. Thanks for your help!

WanderingSol · Dec 31, 2013

I keep a copy on my main computer, my laptop, my backup external drive at home, and my backup external drive that is not kept at home.

I would not use cloud storage as it would be too slow to access for me and I just don't trust someone else with my files.

lambertpix · Dec 31, 2013

I'm not sure I can really come up with too much in that budget range, but I'll tell you how I'm currently handling backups. My image editing PC has mirrored hard drives for data storage (SSD for OS / programs), so all data is replicated across two drives, and this system is backed up weekly onto a Drobo 5N NAS, which has its own RAID-like redundancy. I'm not currently doing off-site backups, but that's on my personal to-do list at some point. I think the key is to be really careful about allowing your images to exist in only one place -- all hard drives will eventually fail, so you want to make sure your images are in at least two distinct locations.

480sparky · Dec 31, 2013

My method:

Use a camera with 2 card slots, and use the second card for backup.

When I ingest images, I copy them to two locations. One location is my primary one, an external hard drive. I use an external for portability of my library. The second drive is a 1tb internal, where I download the images and (usually) never touch them until months later when I eventually delete them.

Once the images are ingested, the card is set aside. For months. I have dozens of cards, and once I ingest the images, I set the cards aside and rotate in the next 2 cards in line.... one that's been sitting for several months. Only then will I reformat the cards to free up the memory space. This gives me access to the first copies of the image for several months if needed.

After ingestion, I rotate 4 external drives on a 1-month basis as back-up for both my primary external drive as well as my computer's original drive with the OS and such. This allows me at least 4 options be back up both drives.

All my important files, from both drives, are direct copied (not backed up, which creates one single file and requires the back-up software to access) to two more external 2tb drives. One is kept at my next door neighbors' house, in their safe. This drive is updated monthly. The other is 800 miles away, and is updated twice a year. These are direct copies of the files, so any computer anywhere can access them. Worse case scenario, I take the drive to FedEx office and I'm only a month out of date.

Do not make the mistake of having all your backups in one physical location. A single incident, like fire, theft, lightning or flood, could still wipe you out. I had a friend show my his 8-drive RAID system sitting next to his tower, and bragged, "I can hot-swap any drive, and any size drive will work. It's all automatic!" I dead-panned, "What happens if your house burns down?"

And fire-proof safes aren't a guarantee either. Your drive may not burn, but it certainly will melt.

wyogirl · Dec 31, 2013

You get a TB of free storage on Flickr, but I don't think you can store raw there, just jpeg/tiff/png etc. I use a 1 TB Toshiba external drive, it was about $80 and it works as expected. I also keep certain files online on Zenfolio and that site is about $120/year but I can sell stuff from it so that helps.

weepete · Dec 31, 2013

I've got too much stuff for reasonably priced cloud storage. I'm also in the process of upgrading my system. At the moment I just back up to an external HDD but my plans are to install another internal HDD that I'll back up to and then do a monthly backup to an external HDD that I'll keep off site.

Kruegs · Jan 2, 2014

Thank you all so much for your advice! I think I'll try two external hard drives first and see how that goes. Any specific hard drive recommendations for around $100 each or are they all pretty similar? I know it's a small budget but I try and limit myself to one big purchase per year and lenses are just so much more fun

. Maybe I'll have to pass on the 70-200mm f/2.8 this year and focus instead on upgrading my computer, monitor, backup system, etc. Thanks again to all for your help!