Backup your photos
March 24th, 2009 by Dan BodensteinIf you’re like me, you have thousands of digital photos. I use to copy all my photos to an external hard drive for safe keeping, until it failed. Okay Dan. In the words of Douglas Adams, don’t panic. I purchased another USB external drive and started copying my photos from my main drive. “Click. Click. Click.” You got it, my main drive started failing. I have no backups of anything now. It took several days and many antacids to get my photos retrieved. I did lose some photos, and the sad part was, I couldn’t tell what they were until I needed them. There has to be a better way.
Drobo
There is. I invested in a Drobo drive. Drobo is a remarkable, yet a bit expensive, solution to redundant backup. Drobo, by Data Robotics, is a drive array. This means it is one drive that is made up of multiple drives. Sound confusing? Think of it as a backup for your backup. The Drobo can have up to 4 hard drives in it, of any size. The Drobo calculates how much of the drives to use for data, and how much to use for redundancy. Okay, blah blah blah tech stuff, I know… you’re bored. Bottom line, if a drive fails you don’t lose your data. You can pull the bad drive out and put a new one in, and Drobo does the rest. The best part is, while the drive is removed, and the new one is being processed, you can still use your Drobo. If a drive is full, or needs replacing, Drobo shows you with lights on it’s front panel. This is a fool proof way of saving photos. Drobo has created a great video to show how the Drobo works.
But is it enough? In my opinion, no. Drobo is a great way to store and protect data from hardware failures, but what about natural disasters. Drobo is not fireproof, or waterproof. So what’s the solution? Online backups. I take all my important photos, my top notch photos and I save them offline. I use iDrive. It’s an online storage service that your computer uploads files to in the background. You can even set it up to do it at specific times, like when your sleeping, or at work. iDrive offers a FREE Account with 2 gigabytes of storage. There are other plans for more storage, but they are all reasonably prices. Another service is Mozy.com, I personally liked iDrives interface better.
All this may seem confusing and overwhelming, but there is hope. Scott Bourne, from This Week in Photography fame, has started a new blog and podcast called “Manage Your Digital Life“. The MYDL staff is dedicated to helping you solve your storage delemna. Their web site states “The Managing Your Digital Life Podcast & Blog is your destination for information on how to deal with all the electronic stuff you accumulate during your daily life. We’re here to answer questions like: What sort of hard drive should I buy? How do I create a backup plan? What’s the difference between backup and archive? We’ll provide tips, tricks, news and reviews relevant to the most up-to-date storage, backup and archiving systems. Our goal is to help you take care of, manage, access and safely store/backup all your precious homework assignments, videos, photos, databases, music files and more.”
So, it’s time to take backups seriously. Do the research, make a plan, and do what is best to protect your digital files.
References
Data Robotics
iDrive
Mozy
Manage Your Digital Life
Comments
Ok, can’t quite afford this Drobo thing you’re talking about, any secondary external hard drive recommendations you can make? My hard drive is overfilled and I’ve never backed up
You don’t need an expensive drive array to protect your photos.
You can get an external USB 250GB drive for under 100.00. If you want to start smaller, a USB 120GB drive is under 80.00.
iDrive.com offers 150GB storage (off site) for 49.50/year or 4.95/month.
This means the file are stored on their servers for you to access anytime, from anywhere.
The most important thing is not to trust your photos/ data to any one source.
The Drobo look good for backup. provide unlimited storage space and easy to handle. Price wise is abit expensive but the technology looks promising. Thanks for introducing it.
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