Friday 6 June 2008
I hear stories of people losing their photographs. I also hear people asking about the best methods to backup their data. I thought people might get value from reading my backup methods, not because I think mine are the best, but simply to provide ideas for some possible methods.
I will first describe my working environment as this is the source for my backup. My main computer is a laptop, an IBM ThinkPad T43. Being a laptop, it is somewhat limited with regards internal storage solutions. The design of the laptop is such that the largest main hard disk drive (HDD) I can install is only 100GB (and they no longer sell them). I currently have an 80GB drive installed. The 80GB drive is close to being full most of the time, but I usually have space for up to 2 months worth of raw+jpg photographs.
The laptop has a second bay which normally has a CD-RW/DVD drive, but can be replaced with a drive bay that will take a 2.5" PATA HDD. I can go up to 250GB. There is also a 2.5" SATA drive bay available and the largest 2.5" SATA drives I have seen a 320GB. I could run the laptop with an HDD permanently in the second bay, I prefer to leave the CD-RW/DVD drive in most of the time, and only put a second HDD in for backup (see below) or when travelling to serve the function of my working drive.
Due to the limitations of the laptop, I have an external 1TB (RAID 1) drive connected to the laptop via USB 2.0. The drive is partitioned into a 736GB D: drive as my working drive for images, a 98GB E: drive which is used as an on-line backup and a 98GB F: drive as a backup for my day job. The D: drive has all my images including raw, JPEG and any other working files such as TIFF. It is the drive from where all my images are imported into Lightroom and it also has any XMP sidecars that Lightroom creates.
I like to start my backup from the moment I copy the files off the CompactFlash card to the hard disks. I use Nikon Transfer to copy the images from the CompactFlash to the D: drive and also to the C: drive. In both cases, the files are put into subdirectories for the camera, year and month under a top directory of "alTables". The meaning of "alTables" is not important and it is something I cooked up over 12 years ago and I'm still using it. So D300 images taken in April 2008 would go to \alTables\NikonD300\200804, on both D: and C:. This means that I could have a single HDD crash and still not lose the newly copied files from the camera.
The files copied to D: I use as my working copy and are imported into Lightroom. The files on C: are just a backup, to be backed up later.
I have a Linux box under the house which is running Samba. Samba lets me do Windows based Net Use connections. While this isn't an off-site backup, as such, it does allow me to connect, copy files and disconnect so the files are somewhat protected from the effects of viruses or accidental erasure. I have a batch file that connects to one of the file systems on the Linux box (via Net Use and I have to enter my userid and password), does an xcopy /m from C: to the connected drive and then disconnects from the Linux box (Net Use /d). This only copies modified (essentially new) files from C:\alTables and turns off the modified bit so they won't be copied again. As I don't use the data on C: as a working copy, the data won't get modified after it has been copied. Note also that only the files from the camera get backed up at this point.
Up until this point I have backed up just the images (raw and/or jpg) from the camera and they are still on-site. My third level of backup allows me to back up the working data as well as take the data off-site. For this I use one of two 250GB drives which I temporarily mount in the second bay of the laptop. I use Microsoft SyncToy to copy from D:\alTables to H:\alTables (H: is the drive in the second bay) using the Contribute action. While I'm at it, I also backup up other data from my C: drive to the H: drive. This includes the local copy of the web site and other important data. This is also done with SyncToy with the Contribute action. I have each of the folder pairs defined in SyncToy and use a batch job to invoke SyncToy with the /R parameter to run each folder pair.
Once a week I take one of the drives off-site and bring the other one home. This way I have the majority of my files backed up off-site.
My final level of backup is to DVD+R discs. This duplicates the second level backup, except it is to DVDs rather than a hard disk. Once a month, I copy the previous month's photographs from C: to DVD and I make 2 copies. One stays on-site (in the basement) and the other goes off-site. The copying is done using Nero Back-it-up to Verbatim or TD 16X DVD+R discs. I then use CDCheck to compare the data on the discs to the data on the Linux box using a different computer. This pretty much verifies both the DVD and Linux copies in one go.
I also ensure I backup while I'm travelling. On a trip (usually a dive trip), I take the same laptop but leave the 1TB at home. I use one of the 250GB drives in the second bay of the laptop as my working drive (just make it D: instead of H: and Lightroom is none the wiser.
My first level backup will be the same as it is at home: all files copied from the CompactFlash card will get copied to both C: (internal laptop drive) and D: (drive in second bay). I also take a small USB connectable drive (around 100-120GB in size) and use that to backup all images and other created files.
When I get home, I backup the C: drive image files to the Linux box, as normal, and synchronise the drive in the second bay with the 1TB drive at home. The drive in the second bay goes back to being the offsite backup. I also make DVD copies of all the images from the trip.