Mario’s note: In today’s article Vicente Nadal shares his vision on how to define a backup strategy and thus have backup copies of the photos we take.
Having a good photo backup strategy is important because how do you know someone who has lost all their photos when their computer crashed? Has it ever happened to you?
The first and fundamental thing to be able to have a good security of your photos is to be aware that having them on drive “C” is a serious mistake and the worst thing you can do for several reasons:
- If the hard drive crashes beyond repair and needs to be replaced, all data is lost.
- If the drive has to be formatted to regain control, data is still lost.
- If an aggressive virus enters and deletes the data, all the photos are also lost
- If your computer is stolen, you lose everything.
The solution is to back up the photos to another drive in one of the following ways:
- Additional disk usage by default.
- Automatic backup.
- Copy the photos in «the cloud».
Let’s see what each of these options is like.
1) Add a “different” disk
On current Windows PCs it is common for the operating system to set up a folder called “My Documents”. Being a so-called “system” folder, it cannot be deleted, but it can be moved, to another disk for example, if you follow some simple instructions.
The first step would be to add an additional hard drive to the computer. You can ask for this at the store where they sell it to you or at any technical service. This new drive will usually be named “E” (although it may have a different letter if you have more drives in your computer).
You can also do it by connecting an external hard drive through the USB port, it works exactly the same.
Once you have this additional disk connected, right-click on the “My Documents” folder and select “Properties”. This is usually on the desktop or you can see it by clicking on the “Computer” icon on the desktop. Once in the properties panel, select the “Location” tab.
In this tab you have the path where this folder is and the possibility to “move” the folder to another location. In this case, you click on “Move” and select the additional hard drive that you have placed as the destination. You can see in the examples that I have this folder on drive “E”. By making this change you will not lose anything, all the files you have are moved to the new location.
The only thing you have to keep in mind is that there must be enough space on the new disk for the data that you already have stored in the “My Documents” folder.
With this change we not only keep our photos safe from catastrophes, we also save any document that we have inside said folder.
The downside of this system is that it forces you to install another hard drive or have it always connected externally.
The advantage is that except for the catastrophe of that disk, you can rest easy, because you can always take all your documents with you.
2) Use automatic backup software
Another way to keep the data safe is to make a backup (Backup is called) automatically. For this I would recommend the Cobian Backup program. It’s in Spanish and it’s easy to use… and it’s free.
Normally backups can be done in two basic ways:
- Global copy of all data every time period.
- Copies only the data that has changed since the last copy.
The best option is to back up any and all new or changed files, creating a “mirror” copy of your data. You only have to indicate to the program the route of the backup and the moment in which it must make the copy.
Obviously, this is useless if you save the backup copy on the same disk as your photos. For it to be effective you have to backup to another external drive… and we run into the same inconvenience as before, having to buy an additional disk 🙂
3) Save your photos in “the cloud”
There are more and more online services that offer free file storage on the Internet. Basically it is about creating identical duplicates of the content of our computer, fully accessible 24 hours a day, 365 days a year… In addition, it is also accessible from the mobile smartphone, tablet, iPad, etc.
Perhaps the best known of all is Dropbox for being possibly the first of all. Currently there are many more, more complete and that offer much more storage space.
Most of these services have a more or less similar operation:
- You access the web page of the service (for example DropBox).
- You create your account with an email and a password.
- Once inside you personalize your data.
- This platform will tell you to install a program on your computer for the file synchronization utility.
- Once this program is installed, a folder for this program is automatically created within the “My Documents” folder (in this case also called DropBox) to synchronize everything you put inside, creating an identical duplicate of its content.
- If you are on a friend’s computer you can access your account on the Web of this service and access your files.
- If your computer is deleted or you buy another one, all you have to do is install the application again and re-enter with your username and password. Miraculously, all your files will copy themselves back to your computer by downloading from the cloud.
- If you install the APP for this service on your smartphone, you can also access your documents from it.
- Normally, these services have automatic upload to the cloud of the photos taken with the phone’s camera (if the user so wishes).
The restriction that most of these programs have is that they can only copy what is inside their folder, which is created automatically and usually this folder is created inside the “My Documents” folder.
A few cloud file services, in addition to creating this folder on your system, allow you to mark which other folders on your entire computer you want to include in the backup. For me the most interesting of all those who do this is SugarSync because in addition to doing this, you can synchronize the contents of a folder between several computers and the phone, so that they all always show exactly the same content.
So you can have the same content on your work computer, the one at home, the one in the little house on the mountain, the laptop and the desktop… All without you noticing and in a totally automatic way.
More than a year ago I wrote an article comparing several of the cloud storage services. It is somewhat outdated but in the basics it is still useful. There are also the manuals for each of the services.
4) “Paranoid” backups
Mario’s note: Warning, the next section of the article may seem too technical. You are warned.
If you are obsessed with security and everything seems little to you, here is what you need, a triple redundant system that will prevent you from ever losing anything.
The first thing is a bit of vocabulary. Now I will tell you about what a RAID disk system is… You better read it on Wikipedia, we will advance more. I wait for you to finish.
Have you already soaked up what a RAID is? Good because for the paranoid Backup system you will have to know what is a RAID1 and a RAID5.
The first thing you have to do is buy a USB-connectable external box that can fit two disks and can be configured as RAID1. This is when the two drives are exact copies of each other, you only see one in your file manager and all the content is duplicated.
The nice thing about these boxes is that if one of the two drives crashes, you swap it out and magically the data from the good drive is copied over to the new one. Thanks to that I have saved my data a couple of times… of course, I use the paranoid system, it shows.
You also have to move the My Documents folder to this double mirrored drive.
Sooner or later you will end up not being able to store everything on this double drive. So you will have to erase data from that disk and move it to another “final” storage.
For that you can do two things: the data that you are going to delete is copied before on two external disks that you will label and save separately… or if you do not want to stop being connected with that data you can create a RAID5 for definitive copies.
Basically a RAID5 is a tower of 5 disks that distributes the data so that even if a disk breaks, without having to turn off the tower and being on, you can change the broken disk for a new one and the data regenerates itself. These boxes can be connected via USB or can be configured as a NAS Network drive..
The capacity of a RAID5 is much higher and it will take many years to complete it, for sure. The only thing RAID5 has is that you have to invest in 5 additional hard drives, but it is catastrophe-proof and compulsive photographer-proof.
If you are a professional or you are thinking of becoming one, having a RAID5 is not an option, it is an absolute obligation.
The third part of the redundant copy would be to copy everything to the cloud with a system like DropBox. Even with several of those programs at the same time… A lot of madness, right? That’s how paranoid I am with my photos 😉
Do you back up your photos? How do you make them? Can you think of any other way to make backups?