Backing up your photos.......

Killjoy · **Backing up your photos....... -** 06-04-2008, 05:43 AM

How do you do it?

Do you have them only on your computer hard drive, and pray nothing happens to it?
Do you have them on an external HD, and pray nothing happens to it?
Do you have a backup(s)?

I was mentioning to Snarfy in another thread about finding an old photo, and thought it would make for an interesting thread.

I'll start.
I have all of my photos on an internal 500Gig HD on my new PC.
That begs the question, "How did all his old photos get on his new pc?"
I copied them off of my main backup which is an external 500Gig HD, which resides under my desk.
To back that up, I have a 320Gig HD on a bookcase shelf (note to self: get a bigger one).
Besides those, I have archival DVD's of my photos that I back up every so often and they are locked in a fireproof cabinet in another closet.

Now, if I wanted to be REALLY anal about it,

I should make another copy and leave them at my mothers house about an hour away.
Barring any horrendous natural disaster, then at least one copy would survive.

So, how do you back up your data?

Abel · 06-04-2008, 06:14 AM

I have four 750g External Hard drives...

M:\ Drive
My main drive where all of my photos are located. This is where all of my cards are dumped to and is what I currently work off of.

N:\ Drive
I use a program call Always Sync which will keep my N:\ Drive as an exact duplicate of my working M:\ Drive.

O:\ Drive
Also an exact duplicate of my working M:\ Drive using Always Sync just like the N:\ Drive.

P:\ Drive
Blank new drive reserved to be my Second Photos working drive since i have about 100g free on my current working M:\ Drive.

In regards to my N:\ Drive and O:\ Drive backups, I alternate between the two in regards to making sure one is left at my parents house at all times. I try to swap them out once a week or two weeks depending on how much I shoot.

So say for instance, M:\ Drive (my working drive) is duplicated to my N:\ Drive and then I swap out the current up to date N:\ Drive with the O:\ Drive backup that is at my parents house and is probably be about 2 weeks out of date. Once I get back home then I re-sync my O:\ Drive with my existing working M:\ Drive so that it's brought back up tp date and repeat the process..

I really need to get two 750gb internal hard drives for my photos and use those as "working" drives and strictly use the externals for backups.. I need to get on that!

DigitalScape · 06-04-2008, 10:20 AM

Similar to what Abel is doing, plus I burn two DVDs of each shoot of the raw and finished images (stored is separate locations).

pattyhm73 · 06-04-2008, 10:32 AM

on computer hard drive, and pray nothing happens to it lol
i procrastinate on backin up on cd and buyin an external HD
i guess if i ever loose mu pic's.....i will die

Snarfy · 06-04-2008, 12:18 PM

Stored on an external drive, backed up on an internal. Gosh, I guess it's time I really start to bump up my storage and redundancy methods!

Abel · 06-04-2008, 12:39 PM

i bought four 750gb external hard drives from bestbuy a couple of months ago for $160 each. they were the usb 2, firewire and esata versions. not bad for $160

Hikin' Mike · 06-04-2008, 01:59 PM

Right now I back-up my photos on DVDs. Better than nothing....

RochinPhotography · 06-04-2008, 09:27 PM

GET YOUR PICTURES BACKED UP!!!!!!

I speak from experience. When I "first started" I had a HD fail and lost my "first pictures". I figured hey it cant happen to me and when it did, I figured it wouldn't happen again. Well recently I lost my PC Internal HD and lost MOST of my images.

NOW, I have 2 750gig HD's that I have EVERYTHING saved on. Im working off my laptop for now but as soon as I get the new PC I will have everything on the internal (plus the 2 back ups) and will start burning everything onto CD and put in my fire/waterproof safe.

outdone · 06-04-2008, 11:52 PM

I gotta start backing up my stuff. With about 60,000 photos... I really should.

Abel · 06-05-2008, 08:21 AM

i went thru the exact same thin Jonathon explained... i lost a ton of my early shots because of a hard drive failure... now i have to have 2 backups of my photos drive just to feel comfortable.

isaiahbrink · 06-05-2008, 11:10 AM

Myself, I use 3 external hard drives plus dvd's. All complete backups, including the unedited files.

Abel · 03-23-2009, 09:11 AM

i just picked up 2 new 1tb external hard drives since i fill my 750g fairly easily. ugh.

now with the 25mb+ 5dmk2 RAW files im sure this new one will get filled even quicker

Bailey · 04-10-2009, 11:07 AM

i like that idea of keeping a copy off site... that never occurred to me! ugh!

ok, now i need another drive... ha!

just4chel · 04-10-2009, 11:28 AM

Do you have them on an external HD, and pray nothing happens to it..!!

and.. hoping for a new computer with bigger memory so I can save it in both HD..

Bailey · 04-10-2009, 01:04 PM

i have one set on the pc and one on an external drive... but their both located in my home office...

i wanna get another drive to keep off site now after reading this thread..

RogerAylstock · 04-10-2009, 01:11 PM

When I have a real shoot (read as "paid"), I move the images to my hard drive them burn them to a DVD(s). After verifying that I can read the DVD ok, then I'll reformat the camera card. Since I usually do a bit of post processing on that set, I'll burn another DVD when that job is done.

For my personal stuff, I'll also move that to DVD but usually only every month or so.

And it's probably not "IF" you have a hard drive crash but "WHEN".

RochinPhotography · 04-10-2009, 02:34 PM

I am also starting to think it may be a good idea to upload all images to my web server. Would not hurt to have a copy in an offsite secure location ya know.

mikegs · 08-25-2009, 06:19 PM

I work off of the internal drive and copy to two different external drives, one via Time Machine (I'm a MAC) and one with Super Duper clone software. All of the data (internal and both external drives) are copied every few days via Mozy online backup. Once a month I pull a few files from Mozy to make sure everything is as it should be. Always check your online backups!

MarieJasmine · 08-25-2009, 07:59 PM

Because I had a laptop that got a virus that distroyed all my files I back up relligiously.

I have all my photos on my laptop, in extreme OCD fashion, organized by file size, the date, the type, the theme,etc.

then I have them also on my back up drive which is one of those my pastport thingyys

then I also have them on our "famliy" computer than only my mom uses when she needs an old verison of flash or some other program or to store crap.

MarieJasmine · 08-25-2009, 08:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RochinPhotography

I am also starting to think it may be a good idea to upload all images to my web server. Would not hurt to have a copy in an offsite secure location ya know.

Yeah I have all my good ones on my parents server. Yay for my parents owning a webdesign company and being graphic designers ! haha.

Lilikoi the cat · 08-25-2009, 08:17 PM

I don't have any worth saving

Killjoy · 08-25-2009, 09:05 PM

You adopted out your namesake?

Swanny338 · 08-25-2009, 09:30 PM

My working drive is an external 2Tb FW drive which has another 2TB FW drive daisy chained to it which works as my backup drive. I do an incremental backup every night after doing whatever photo or video work I was doing. I am considering putting together an 8TB+ raid since those 2TB's are almost full. That 5d footage converted to prores really eats up that space. A 30GB video shoot turns into almost 150Gigs after the transcoding. Once I finish the final cut and export it I delete the prores clips and keep the raw 5dii files, so that helps a lot.

Killjoy · 09-07-2009, 07:48 AM

Today I decided to back up my photo drive to one of my external drives.
As I was filtering through it to figure out where I had stopped the last time, I realized that this is the first time I have done a backup this year.

You'd have thought that when my Operating System crashed in June that I would have taken that as a sign to back up then.

But I guess not.

I started the backup about a half hour ago.
It's telling me I have another 73 minutes to go.

I guess I took a few photos, huh?

Lilikoi the cat · 09-07-2009, 09:44 AM

and you haven't posted any new ones (also pointing finger at oneself too).

Yes, Lilikoi has a new home.
What are easy ways to sort photos out? Multiple locations in different files? Say a Golden Gate bridge pic, in two files Ca. and bridges? I am just curious on how to sort my junk out. I also need to start trashing some of my photos too but am becoming a "photo horder".

I found out where Snarfys avatar came from. http://www.weebls-stuff.com/toons/kenya/
all I have to say is PIE!!!

Killjoy · 09-07-2009, 11:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lilikoi the cat

and you haven't posted any new ones.

And HOW can you justify your comment after even you looked at the photos I posted from the Soapbox Derby?

Hikin' Mike · 09-07-2009, 11:47 AM

My dad bought me a 500G external drive about 6 months ago...no more DVDs! My stuff gets backed up every night @ 11pm.

Killjoy · 09-07-2009, 12:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Killjoy

Now, if I wanted to be REALLY anal about it,

I should make another copy and leave them at my mothers house about an hour away.
Barring any horrendous natural disaster, then at least one copy would survive.

This option just got easier.

My mother moved to town and now lives about ten minutes away.

RochinPhotography · 09-10-2009, 08:04 AM

Yeah, Another good option would be to invest in a nice waterproof/fireproof safe. You don't have to buy a huge one being you only need to put a couple external HD's in it.

mpklaus · 09-23-2009, 11:22 AM

2 1TB HD and Carbonite