Happy World Backup Day!
Are you backed up?
Today is World Backup Day, bringing awareness for the need to protect your data, and most importantly, your precious photos. When you have a lot of photographs, proper backups can be cumbersome. I want to take a look at the primary sources of data loss, and the strategies I use to help prevent it.
Common Sources of Data Loss
Drive failure
Accidental deletion (Operator error)
Catastrophe (fire/flood/tornado)
Drive Failure: A Matter of When, Not If
It’s pretty much established that all drives can fail over time. The good news is that most hard drives today are built to be extremely reliable. Nevertheless, since we’re not replacing computers as often as we once did, there’s a good possibility that your hard drives have been around for quite some time.
Accidental Deletion
We all make mistakes. I’ve done it, too. If you accidentally delete a file, it’s gone unless you have a backup tool in place. The best tools for protecting against accidental deletion are automated backup databases. These tools will backup regularly, but only incrementally (they only write changed files). Incremental backups are much faster than full backups, and can be used immediately to restore data from another disk.
Catastrophic Data Loss
If you are in a natural disaster, you risk losing everything. Even if your photos and data are all backed up, what would happen if you lost your home or office in a fire? For this situation, you’ll need to make sure you can store your backups off-site, or be able to take your backup with you in the need of an evacuation.
Strategies for protecting against data loss
Data partitioning: Don’t put all your data on a single drive
I have all of my photos on an external drive instead of in my computer’s internal drive. This frees up space on the boot drive and allows me to have a smaller capacity internal drive, saving money.
Make regular backups
If you want fast access to backed-up files, consider making a local backup onto another hard drive you have. You can store your backup drive disconnected from your computer, to reduce its usage time.
Full backup tools, like Carbon Copy Cloner can be used to create complete backups on the schedule of your choosing.
Mac users can use Time Machine for making automatic daily or hourly incremental backups. It’s saved my butt more than once. You’ll want to set up a backup drive with at least 50% more capacity than your total storage amount. I don’t use Time Machine to back up my photos; there’s simply too many of them and I’d need a massive drive to do it. I use it to keep my important documents, email, and applications backed up for instant recovery.
Windows users can use Windows File History and/or the Backup & Restore tools found in Windows 11 and higher.
Use external storage media for your backups
If your data are stored on an internal drive (inside your PC), it might be cumbersome to bring the entire computer with you in the event of a disaster.
Put your data on external drives or in external drive enclosures to make it easy to take your drives with you
Solid-state drives
Solid-state drives (SSDs) don’t have moving parts. They are basically large versions of the memory cards used in your camera.
SSDs can fail, but do so at a much lower rate than standard spinning drives (HDDs)
SSDs are far more expensive than traditional HDDs, which makes them not ideal for mass storage applications. However, SSDs are excellent for local photo storage because of their performance over HDDs
Use a mixture of drive types: SSDs for fast performance and HDDs for long-term storage
A 4TB external SSD makes for a great Time Machine disk for your core data files (photos notwithstanding).
Use a cloud backup service
Cloud storage is the ultimate off-site backup solution
Your data are uploaded to cloud servers and backed up incrementally
Cloud backups provide protection against both catastrophic data loss and accidental deletion, depending on the service and backup frequency you choose.
There is no limit to the amount of data you back up, which is ideal for photographers with many terabytes of images
You can recover your data either by downloading directly from the cloud, or having your files sent to you on a removable storage device such as a thumb drive or a portable HDD.
Consider a RAID array (advanced)
A RAID array is a virtual hard drive (volume) that consists of two or more physical hard disks. Depending on the configuration you choose, you can rebuild the array should one of the disks in it fail without losing data.
RAID arrays are best when you want to have a large amount of local storage that is protected from drive failure.
RAID arrays can be slower than single disks, so they’re better for long-term storage than fast-access.
When it comes to your photos, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Hopefully you have all your critical data backed up. If not, today is a good day to start implementing some or all of the backup strategies I present here.