Poll

How are you backing up your digital photos?

Only registered users are allowed to vote for this poll.
37 votes were received.

To the Cloud! (up, up and away!)	3		8%
External drives (including RAIDS)	30		81%
DVD and CD media	4		11%
Floppy - yeah baby!!	0		0%

---

I was just reading an article in a photography mag where they were mentioning various "cloud" storage backup options for photographers. Their consensus was that none are the perfect solution for photo backup as of yet.

I still have my photos stored in duplicate, uncompressed, on multiple external drives. How are you backing up these days?

---

JoeM

DropBox

---

**************************************
Nothing to see here, move along.

Not a pro photog (not even a gifted amateur), but I back up to hard drives. "The Cloud" ? Too fuzzy and potentially unreliable.

1) Cloud
2) Time Machine
3) offline hard drives.

(all of them)

---

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/23/2012 12:11PM by mattkime.

Doesn't backing up everything normally (which includes photos, and all media) suffice? Or is there additionally supposed to be special "photo backup" that's segregated? Or do some not do backup, but only store copies of photos?

Quote
guitarist
Doesn't backing up everything normally (which includes photos, and all media) suffice? Or is there additionally supposed to be special "photo backup" that's segregated? Or do some not do backup, but only store copies of photos?

I backup everything to external hard drives. I don't trust ANYTHING to "the cloud". I don't think it's going to take long before you start hearing stories about people who thought it was ok to backup their personal stuff to "the cloud", only to find out that all that personal information was hacked.

I don't really see how the cloud services, at least the ones I'm aware of, would work for pros who might have terabytes upon terabytes of data. For regular folk, seems like your usual CCC or time machine backups are just fine.

I use Time Machine to backup to external hard drives. Every couple weeks I take one drive to work, and bring the one at work home. (The one at home is the "live" backup drive. The one at work is just sitting there disconnected as my "off-site" backup.)

I did backup to Dreamhost's free (if you have a hosting account) 50 GB server space, but they effed up and I lost everything. Fortunately, that was jut a backup, and *not* the live data. It didn't really cause any problems, but it made me a bit more leery of online backup solutions.

That said, I'll probably start doing an online backup again at some point. My iPhoto library (which includes *lots* of HD video from my digital still camera) is way over 100 GB!

With external HDs so incredibly cheap, I drag my iPhoto library and my iTunes library to an external HD about once a week. Time Machine backs up my Mac's internal HD that holds the OS and apps.

Over 40k digital photos from the past 15 years - Yes 1997.

Multipronged approach:

1. Time Machine to Time capsule
2. Super Duper weekly clone to Ext drive
3. Crashplan free, local backup to another Ext drive
4. Cloud backup to Phanfare.com (Primarily my photo sharing service, but backs up 75+ GB of my photos)

I do what UnDoug does, but occasionally add a 3rd HD BU for photos only because they are the one thing that are truly irreplaceable.

---

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. — Oscar Wilde

A couple of links about the subject:

[www.pixiq.com]
[www.thephoblographer.com]

---

JoeM

Zip
Jaz
Orb
Syquest
Bernoulli...

and when they fail,

OK, a bunch of hard drives, with various projects also backed up on DVD/CD.
Pretty standard.
I keep extra copies of the good stuff, which is to say all the raw (not RAW) photo data gets backed up two or three times to start with, and then the good stuff gets moved to a working drive, wherefrom it also gets backed up a couple of more times. Also pretty standard.

///

Basically, this:

Backup hourly using Time Machine to a mirror RAID NewerTech GMax.
Backup nightly using Carbon Copy Cloner to two different drives, which are rotated off-site regularly.

I'm pretty confident in the system. I back up for mechanical failure and catastrophic loss.

---

Data is data. Backing up, using whatever the recommended methods, is backing up. Just because they're photos, it's till the same as any other data that must be preserved. From there, the discussions about which of the backup methods, or tools, is the best, or most useful, is always instructive, since improvements are always welcome. I imagine a lot of us employ more redundancy than we used to, mainly because we can. Local, cloud, all kinds. More than one backup, more security.

Then, an occasional "Fire Drill", to actually know how to recover, and then evaluate the recovery. I find that last step is the one we least often take. For a time, I used to blow up my system (on an non-critical system, a test platform) then rebuild it from backup, because I found it improved my confidence. It helped to reveal flaws in my method, or habits. Or, to confirm that I'm doing it right. Almost all methods have some quirks, or odd things missing or imperfect after a recovery. It's helpful to test that stuff, to see how to better perfect it.

Quote
JoeM
I still have my photos stored in duplicate, uncompressed, on multiple external drives. How are you backing up these days?

^^^^^^^ This.

And we just bought a 1TB 2.5" HD for the most important things to go into the safe deposit box at the bank.

1) Time Machine backup of entire Photos folder
2) Photo selects archived Dropbox which syncs them across multiple computers
3) Backup hard drive sent to parents

the primary benefit of a "cloud" backup is that its off site.

---

external drives

I've had cd and dvd go bad

---

Kooper's Flute Thing cover

[www.freethegrapes.org]

norwegian wood reality TV

[www.youtube.com]

Quote
DRR
1) Time Machine backup of entire Photos folder
2) Photo selects archived Dropbox which syncs them across multiple computers
3) Backup hard drive sent to parents

Why do you isolate only photos to backup? instead of simply including them in a full backup?

burning building, grab something before you leave: Excel spreadsheets or photos?