Being photographers, we know the importance of backing up the data on your computer. Honestly, what is worse than a hard drive failing and realizing you didn’t back up the pictures from your recent vacation, or your child’s first birthday party or any other host of once in a lifetime memories you took pictures of to capture those moments and remember them.
In the past with film based cameras, you took the film in for developing and got prints. Although prints have a shelf-life too, most of us would put them in a box, in a cabinet and break them out every few years trying to find that one special one, right? They might be vulnerable to the perils of time and disaster, or improper storage – but the only one of these perils digital can protect against is the peril of time, and even that is debatable. After all, who says that today’s digital graphics standards will be accepted or used in 50 years? The industry does move fast.
NAS devices such as this one from Buffalo Technology can store several terabytes of data and is easy to use.
It is a pretty safe bet though that your average digital device will still be able to open those vacation pictures from 2010 in 2110, so time might not be the biggest peril. What is the biggest peril is the failure of the memory device you keep your pictures stored on.
Think of it this way – the device you stored your pictures on takes the place of the negatives in the days of film. Most of us don’t print every picture – one of the many conveniences of digital photography – so if your storage device fails and if your data isn’t stored correctly, your pictures or the ability to print your pictures is lost forever.
So how do you avoid this? There are several ways:
Live storage – if you edit and clean-up your photos, your live storage can exist on the PC or another PC type device. This makes it convenient to open the images, work with them, email them or share them out on sites like Facebook. Although the pictures can reside here for as long as you want them to, assuming you have the storage space for the images and all of your other necessary files, this should never been the only location.
External PC Storage – as a general term, this would be a hard disk drive attached to your PC, whether it be a USB connected drive or a spare drive inside of your desktop PC. Traditional hard drives have a life expectancy of 2-5 years (and I personally don’t trust them beyond three) so this should not be relied upon as the only back-up.
Many tower chassis PC’s have room for multiple drive inside of the case and have the feature functionality allowing for multiple spare hard drives in a RAID-1 configuration. This would mean two hard drives tha mirror each other, giving you two exact copies of the data on them. This is a great idea – if one drive fails, the other still retains the same data and can be copied to a new drive. We would suggest this option if you work with your photos often and you require a large amount of “live” images.
Solid-State Storage – Now available for a higher cost are Solid-State Drives. These are Hard Drives, but they are memory based drives without a spinning platter and mechanical read-arm. Solid-state drives are more reliable and less prone to failure due to vibrations or drops, but significantly more expensive currently than standard hard drives. A solid-state drive can be installed into an external hard drive case and connected via USB for a very reliable desktop storage solution for both archiving and maintaining “live” images.
Removable Media – USB flash drives and other removable media such as secure digital cards, although they can still become corrupted or fail, it is much less common than with mechanical hard drives. With the price of all memory products dropping all the time, images can be archived to this media and stored in a fire-proof safe in order to protect a copy of the images long-term.
Optical Media – Very cost effective and easy to use, we recommend images being archived to DVD-R or CD-R media. Optical media has a shelf life of 100 years, or more. If kept clean and scratch free, it provides a great media option for keeping a non-volatile, long-term archived copy of the images.
DVD-R media can get a little flaky if the disk is written to full capacity. We recommend limiting a DVD-R archive to 3GB or less per disc.
Network Storage – A NAS (Network Attached Storage) device can provide a very reliable and convenient way to manage, access and share your images and other media files. A NAS device, similar to the RAID drive example mentioned above, can make use of multiple hard drives to keep redundant copies of your data, protecting it if a single drive in the device fails. These devices are easily configured for access by any computers or other devices on your home or small office network and many even come with a web-based access feature so you can access your files from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection.
Internet Storage – An excellent way to keep your data safe from premise disasters that can threaten anything stored locally (fire, flood, natural disaster). There are some online storage vendors that will provide up to 100GB of storage for only about $100 per year – typically anything beyond a small-office sized storage (250GB or more) will cost significantly more and remember, at a typical broadband 1Mbps upload rate sending all your images to an online storage center could take hours, if not days.
What is our recommendation for the typical home user? Consider using an online storage service, but at least keep your images backed up to a NAS device and archive them to DVD-R or CD-R media. Make sure you keep multiple copies of the optical discs (they’re cheap enough, burn a few when you make them) and keep the discs on a shelf. Just like the old days, you can always take the DVD off the shelf and look through them, and reminisce about all those good times!
