Well, we all do backups, right?

Ok, so most of us probably don’t have anything to backup, so don’t bother, or just make a DVD every now and again.

Unfortunately for the creative among us, keen photographers, artists, video and television addicts, backing up has become rather complex.

Does your backup solution give you a nice warm feeling? 🙂

Yes, sure disk space is cheap, but lets do the maths for your average digital photographer:

• A days shooting can easily create 8GB of photos – if you only average one full day every other month you’re going to wind up with 40 GB of data every year. (This is a very conservative estimate).
• To get this on DVD, it’s going to take about 9 DVD disks and roughly a couple of hours to create, label and index – and that is without verifying the data after every write operation – not ideal.

If you are adding this to an existing archive, of say 150 GB, you now have 190 GB to look after. If you have already burned this lot to DVD, you will have > 40 disks on the shelf.

Things get even worse from here – add in your MP3 and film collections and even a modest requirement could well exceed 200 GB: does your wife/kids etc use a camera/camcorder? Data volumes in the home are set to explode exponentially, with the advent of cheap multimegapixel cameras and camcorders.

So, if you only do 5 full backups a year – you’re going to need a terabyte of disk space.

Ok.

So this does not seem much, but you have to ask yourself, how much longer you want to maintain a DVD library and all its associated workload. If you don’t, are you willing to keep all your precious data on just two hard disks?

Currently, I have moved to a hard disk only backup solution – I could not find any other more robust/effective  methodology:

• DAT tape would be ok, but a DAT autoloader is rather a significant cost, ditto DLT and LTO technology.
• A DVD library would be huge, as I’m currently storing 300 GB.
• Online backup is almost useless, the current upload speeds are small and getting even 5 GB on Mozy or similar services takes ages. Let’s not even contemplate the recovery times – they would need to send you a hard disk in the post.

So far I have not factored in another issue, the photographers nemesis – ‘Bit Rot’. Anyone who has suffered image degradation due to this phenomenon will know how depressing it is to view pixellated image damage, shot randomly through all your shots.

Solution? Well, none of it is cheap:

• The shots are copied to hard disk and stored / managed in their working folders: these folders are contained on mirrored SATA II hard disks.
• These working folders are then backed up to a RAID 10 array – on a different computer.

So far so good – I’m safeguarded from disaster by a factor of four – i’d have to loose 4 hard disks to completly loose the lot.

However, I still have to cover the possibility of these machines getting stolen or lost in fire/flood etc. So on a regular basis I take a complete copies and rotate several 1 TB hard disks to a relatives house.

This situation is still not ideal, as it would mean months of data lost, if I get burgled / have a fire etc,  just before I rotate out a disk!  Moreover, when the archive reaches > 1 TB, I will have to use two disks each time or purchase 2TB disks instead….

So, there you have it, the photographers dilema – ditch DVD now or continue with this time consuming operation?

Oh, and don’t rush out and get the latest Nikon or Canon top end DSLR either, or you will need to double these storage requirements. 🙂