Professional-Grade Backup Plans

January 02, 2012 | David Marx | Comments 15

Prepare for total system failure or expect to lose everything when disaster inevitably strikes!

There is a fundamental law in computing: all hard drives will eventually fail. As a professional photographer, the thought of losing everything that I have ever shot terrifies me. Total data loss is what my business must expect if I fail to prepare adequate safeguards.

My philosophy on how to best protect my digital images borrows from the sport of rock climbing. Smart rock climbers use redundant safety systems to prevent disaster. Intelligent climbers always attach their climbing rope to multiple anchor points so that they will not fall all the way to the ground if one piece of their protective equipment fails. Serious digital photographers should adopt a similar backup philosophy. Multiple copies of all mission-critical files, in multiple locations, is the only way to truly prepare for the unexpected.

The American Society of Media Photographers DPBestFlow.org project describes this backup philosophy as the “3-2-1 Rule.” Here is what their experts have to say:

We recommend keeping 3 copies of any important file (a primary and two backups.)
We recommend having the files on 2 different media types (such as hard drive and optical media), to protect against different types of hazards.
One copy of each critical file should be stored offsite (or at least offline).

We are each responsible for creating our own backup systems before a catastrophe happens. Planning and preparing for the inevitable is your responsibility no matter what type of computer you use. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a wonderful program, but it is not a backup plan. Photoshop Lightroom use will not protect you from drive failure, virus attacks, or natural disaster and does nothing to protect your precious images. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom does include an “Automatic Catalog Backup” feature. If activated, this feature will make additional copies of the core Lightroom Catalog database file on a regular basis. This additional copy of your .lrcat database file is useful if the primary database gets lost or corrupted. Do not let this feature fool you. Photoshop Lightroom’s integrated Catalog backup feature does not protect your digital images at all.

Photoshop Lightroom also offers its users the chance to create an additional copy of their images during the Import process. Many Photoshop Lightroom users mistakenly assume that this feature “protects” their images as they are added to their Lightroom database. Sadly, this is also not true. The “Create an Additional Copy on Import” feature simply duplicates each image but it does not force you to store these files on a separate hard drive. Storing the primary image and a copy on the same hard drive offers no additional protection. Both the primary and the secondary copy could be destroyed if this disk fails.

The “Additional Copy on Import” feature simply creates another copy of each image involved in this particular Import session but, sadly, the duplicate file is never updated. This feature is of very limited value as a backup even if you were to use one drive for the primary image and specify a separate drive for the second copy. The problem is that changes to the primary image, the file that is referenced by your Lightroom Catalog database, are not automatically added to its duplicate. Since the copied files are never updated, returning to these files after a major disaster might be crushing setback. If you had to resort to using these files after a major disaster then you might have to do all of your Photoshop Lightroom work over again!

Let’s discuss real backup plans rather than wasting time exploring Photoshop Lightroom’s placebos. My image backup plan involves a pair of high-capacity external hard drives and an Amazon s3 storage account. Here’s what I do to protect myself from every possible threat:

Daily Backup

My Favorite Backup Software (Mac)

The data on my computer is automatically cloned to an external hard drive every night. It is easy to schedule a reliable daily backup of your entire computer, or your most critical files, with good backup software. There are a lot of backup programs on the market, so try before you buy. On a Mac, I am particularly fond of a donation-ware backup utility called Carbon Copy Cloner. When I work with Windows computers, I have had good luck using a program called Acronis True Image Home, but there are lots of other excellent options.

Acronis True Image Home 2012 Boxed Software

My Favorite Backup Software (Windows)

Each backup program has its own strengths and weaknesses; the important part is configuring your backup software of choice so that it runs automatically everyday and it protects every critical file. If my computer were to crash right now, I could plug my backup disk into another machine and immediately begin to restore all of my work. I would loose no more than one day’s worth of work thanks to my daily backups!

Weekly Backup Drive Swap

The external hard drives that I am currently using for my Daily Backup are swapped out once a week. In my system, Backup Disk 1 gets used for a week and then I swap it out for Backup Disk 2. A week later, I swap Backup Disk 2 out and replace it with Backup Disk 1 again. The backup disk that I am not currently using gets stored out in my garage. If I wanted even more protection, I would take this disk to a friend’s house or, better still, store it in a bank’s safe deposit box. The further that the idle backup disk gets away from the primary the better! Storing the idle backup disk outside of the house increases the odds that my critical files will survive a catastrophic event like a house fire, lightning strike, or theft and adds an additional level of safety to my backup plans. Daily backups are my top priority, but keeping my backup drive in the same room as my computer offers no protection from a major disaster. Since I rotate backup drives weekly, I might lose a few days worth of work, but that’s a whole lot better than losing everything.

Amazon s3 Backup

As a professional photographer, I must take backups seriously. I have a couple hundred photos that are of such commercial or personal value that they are worth protecting from a major catastrophe. An off-site and off-line backup disk adds a lot of protection to my backup scheme, but even this is no guarantee that my data will survive an enormous major natural disaster. Fortunately, there are cheap and easy ways to back files up online. An earthquake, hurricane, or flood could destroy all of my hard drives. If a natural disaster strikes, and I survive, then I could eventually buy myself another computer and camera. All of my hardware is replaceable, but some of my most valuable images and critical business documents are not.

Online, “cloud,” backup is in its infancy right now. I suspect that the day will come when the vast majority of our data is stored and backed up in the online “cloud.” Right now, I don’t have the Internet upload speed needed to keep a copy of every image online, but I can certainly afford to upload my most valuable images and documents to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (s3) bucket. Redundant Amazon s3 storage currently costs less than .2 cents per gigabyte per month for US customers! My monthly storage bill averages less than $1 per month. What this Amazon s3 online backup really buys me is peace of mind. It comforts me to know that, even if my local backup plans fail, my most precious images and my business’s tax records are still safely stored on multiple servers in multiple countries. I could eventually retrieve these files from anywhere in the world if I have to flee from my home.

Is this being completely paranoid? Yes, but the price is so low that I think it is totally worth it. Plus, the frequency of natural disasters is expected to rise exponentially through the next century….

Conclusion: Internal hard drives and external hard drives will all eventually fail; both expensive and cheap disks will fail. Nothing electronic lasts forever. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a wonderful image management tool, but it is not a backup system. The need for a backup plan is universal. If all of this seems like a lot of effort, then please consider the dismal alternative. If you have no backup plans, what will you lose when your computer crashes? Could you really re-shoot your favorite pictures or are some of them simply irreplaceable? I believe that the time and effort that I have invested in my backup plans is time well spent, even if disaster never strikes. At least I can sleep at night knowing that I have done all I can to prepare for some catastrophic event.

Professional-Grade Backup Plans

Prepare for total system failure or expect to lose everything when disaster inevitably strikes!

Daily Backup

Weekly Backup Drive Swap

Amazon s3 Backup

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