One of the things I’ve wanted to write about for a while is the modern day equivalent of light-tight boxes. Namely, how do you make sure you keep track of all your images, and more importantly, make sure they are always available to you when you need them?
I only know a relatively few photographers, and most of them are also computer geeks (like me), so they probably already know all about this. Other folks, especially some of the models I’ve worked with, don’t, and have been put into bad situations because of it. So what is “this”? One word:
Backups.
Most people don’t really think about backing up their data – they just assume “oh, it’s on the hard drive, it’ll always be there”. Well, most people outside of the IT world, anyway. Some are aware that a single hard drive could crash, sending their precious documents and images to the Great Server in the Sky, so they buy an external drive and copy stuff to it when they think of it.
Admittedly, this type of thing is often “good enough” – except when it isn’t. Let’s face it, this is nothing more than copying files someplace else once. It’s not a true backup scheme. It can be a single backup, but as far as backups go, like lights with night SCUBA diving, “two is one, one is done”. One backup is, pretty much not a backup. Trust me on this – I had a recent scare with my own portfolio where I thought I’d lost everything – and I had a backup disk. One backup disk. I also had one computer that disk was readable on – the computer that had just gone casters-up.
So, what do you need for a “real” backup solution? First off, you don’t need some ridiculously expensive software that gives you a fancy GUI, nor do you need a fancy color-coded report mailed to you telling you how space your backups are taking, how many backups you have, or anything like that. Chances are you will need to spend some money, and it probably won’t be “drop a $20 and done”, but it also won’t be a huge ongoing monthly cost. My environment, which was recently updated in light of the incident I mentioned above, is probably one of the more involved, and thus expensive, setups needed for personal backups. The first thing you need is an external disk, or another computer, to hold the backups. Is the additional computer absolutely necessary? No, but it is important you have an external disk that can be moved to a new system and read from easily. There are consumer NAS products available that will satisfy this requirement easily – even some of the USB external disks will work, if you don’t get too fancy with filesystem types and RAID levels (like I did…).
Second, you need to set up a regular backup “job” that happens without you ever needing to think about it. Personally I prefer the daily/weekly/monthly scheme – I have a script that runs late at night every night that copies all my data to a backup area. It then bundles it up together into a single backup file (a .tar.gz if you’re curious – if you don’t know what a .tar.gz is, think of it as either the equivalent of a Zip file, or just as a Bag of Holding for all my data for that day), and timestamps that file with the day of the week. On Sundays, an additional script kicks in and copes the Sunday bundle to a weekly area, and then on the first of each month, a third script comes in and copes the daily bundle to a monthly area timestamped with that month’s name. This gives me a full week of daily backups, I rotate four weeks of weekly copies, and a full year of monthly copies. And it’s all done automatically for me. The only times I’m consciously aware of anything with the backups are 1) when I need to restore something because I did something stupid like deleting a directory tree or 2) when the backup script fails for some reason. Usually, the next nights backups succeed so I can safely ignore the failure, but sometimes I’ve gone and put something in the system that confused my backup script so I have to make it smarter.
So there it is – a very high-level view of what it takes to back up a digital portfolio. If anyone would like me to go into more detail in a later post, I’ll be happy to – my system is somewhat complex because I’m a sysadmin by day, but I’m more than happy to explain it or simplify it for anyone else who needs advice.