Lets face it; the world revolves around digital files. For the sake of this post lets talk specifically about your digital photos. I doubt a day goes by that you don’t take or receive a photo of some kind. I also doubt in the fast paced moment you think through your options for long-term storage. Luckily, companies like Apple make it pretty simple to automate the backup process. Also, through social media you kind of have a free backup solution when you simply share online. There are some obvious limits to this, but you get the gist.

Aside from the mobile world, there are the other photos. The photos you paid a photographer to document a milestone in life like a wedding or the birth of a little one. What about photographers? We are stewards of those memories and responsible for safe keeping images up to and even after we deliver the images to a client. While this is written to the audience of a photographer, the info following will give anyone an idea of what a true backup solution entails.

Recently one of our hard drives for our client work decided to snuff it. Caput. Dead. I brought it to some experts to see if it could be restored, but the nature of the failure meant sending it off to a data recovery service, which would cost upwards of $3,000+ because of the size of the drive. Now don’t worry, I had fail-safes in place and we didn’t loose a single client image. My backup protocol worked, but I’ll admit it did give me pause and made me rethink some things.

Allow me to scream this loudly with my clever use of italics, bold font and caps:

Photographers AND aspiring photographers: If you have not thoroughly reviewed your back up solutions, you are completely crazy. AN EXTERNAL HARD-DRIVE IS NOT ENOUGH.

 I’ve noticed that many photographers are extremely technical and knowledgeable about their photo equipment. They can name each lens and camera like it’s their own child (and most of the time it is just as expensive as a kid), but when it comes to computer hardware, there may not be quite as much time, money and thought devoted to it past getting a fast computer and photo editing tools. I can’t entirely fault them as there is a lot to focus on, but it’s quite the gamble and they don’t even know it.

Here are what all photographers should have in place. I’ll give a breakdown of each.

1. Short Term Storage on redundant drives
2. Long term storage via drive backup AND cloud storage
3. Hardware Monitoring

 

Short Term Storage:

Meet “Vader”

 

This little guy is one of our hard drive units. It holds 4 independent drives that each have a capacity of 5 Terabytes. It has its own cooling unit and is set up in a special configuration called “RAID 1” It’s where most of the action happens and is our most active drive as it is the one we edit and work from.

RAID stands for – “redundant array of independent disks”

Basically a RAID system executes a fancy combo of software and hardware in order to space data across different hard drives depending on your need. While there are many ‘RAID Levels’ we will focus on ‘RAID 1.’ In a RAID 1 set up, data is exactly mirrored across 2 or more drives automatically.

Courtesy Seagate.com

The cool thing here is that its not really “backing up” data so much as treating multiple hard drives as one unit. For example, when I save a file on to “Vader” I am saving it to all 4 drives at once. In fact my computer doesn’t even see 4 different places to save a file. It sees 4 hard drives as if it were one, thus my saved file is instantly replicated over the 4 drives. If one of the drives were to fail, 3 more continue without skipping a beat. I’d simply replace the failed drive and my system would automatically rebuild the 4^th drive with all of the data and it would be like nothing happened. Hard drives don’t fail very often, but “not very often” is often enough to make sure you have multiple redundancies in place. If you are a photographer, a RAID 1 set up is your starting point. End of story.

 

Long Term Storage:

This one isn’t all that complex. Our long-term archive storage is a combo of a 2 hard drive RAID 1 setup and online cloud storage. Basically once our short term hard drives are full we transfer all of the information we want archived on to smaller and therefore cheaper hard drive arrays, and put them in a closet. The other, and more important storage option we have is our online service. We pay a monthly fee to Smugmug, which is a great photo-hosting site. They give us unlimited storage and do a great job in some other areas as well. To be quite honest, we’d pay what it costs now and more simply for the cloud service. We upload the edited high res jpegs to their servers and poof, offsite long-term storage. Yay.

 

Hardware Monitoring:

 This is something I had not done before the major loss of a hard drive I mentioned above. Now, all of my hard drives have a monitoring system that constantly scout for indicators a drive may fail. In my example above I likely would have been alerted to the failure and been able to take action before. It’s also essential to a RAID setup because without it you can be oblivious to drive failure. Remember, in a RAID 1 set up, even if one drive fails, the others continue humming and working; often so well you don’t even know one drive bit the dust.

Like I said before, this topic can be enormous. It can also be a headache for creative professionals who don’t fancy themselves I.T. specialists. You’ll notice I didn’t mention cost. As a pro you should put as much stake in data management as you do that nice new prime lens that gives you that ever so special bokeh you love. I’ve tried to hit the highlights and give an overview of our approach. If you’re someone who needs help in this area let me know in the comments or shoot us a message. I’m always willing to help and share information with others. Happy shooting!

 

-Kyle