How are you backing up your photos?

[johannielscom]

I recently bought a LaCie 2Big 4 TeraByte station. Have it set up in RAID, so drives are mirrored. Won't help one bit when the house burns down though.

With regards to getting the files on there, this is what I do: I set VueScan to save my scans in the same folder always. I have Lightroom look at that folder (File, Auto Import, Import Settings) and tell it to copy my images to the folder where I want them to be stored (in my case, the LaCie 2Big).

1 In VueScan I start with giving the right names straight away: 20110623-66Portra400VC-framenumber shows that this image was scanned on June 23rd 2011, is 6x6 on Portra400VC, and frame number is also included.
2 In your target folder, set up subfolders with year and month. I'm currently scanning to 201106.
3 Set up LR as above. Tell it to use the same filename and to move the files to the new folder. Tell it to put them in a subfolder named 20110602-66Portra400VC-subject.
4 For each new scan job, change the Lightroom target subfolder name to reflect the correct date, film format and film type and subject.
5 All your files now are automatically copied to the target folder and stored in a subfolder that reflects date, film format, film type and subject. All your files are available in Lightroom. The catalog is on your local hard drive, while all the files are on a network drive.

In this article I have laid out my system of storing negatives, and it links into this approach for the digital files. Altogether this is an integral approach to scanning, storing digital files and negatives.

The negatives go into a paper envelope and into a plastic box in the cellar, to be dug up decades from now once I am famous 😉


This works for me and I'm happy to share my 2 cents, might help out others to organise! Took me almost two years to get a good modus operandi for this...

 

[Richard G]

Mike Johnston on The Online Photographer site had a great post a few days ago on how to increase the likelihood of your photographs surviving you. First instruction was to become famous. Moving on from that was to edit down to a box of prints of your best stuff that your descendants might find easy enough to keep and examine and preserve. Millions of negs and millions of files on drives are more likely to be chucked or kept till they're useless, never examined. I am amazed how few on this thread have mentioned printing of digital files. I have no confidence in the preservation of any single electronic file over 15 years except by regularly examining the file in one of its three locations, deleting corrupt copies and duplicating the one or two uncorrupted copies etc etc. For how many files would I have the time to do that? My non-photographer friends with children stand a good chance of having nothing left of their kids' early photos except the lousy aging colour prints on the mantle piece.

 

[Jbig]

I didn't know Carbonite had a limit. I have nearly 100gig stored there (in addition to an external drive and my old chock-full Macbook).

 

[Avotius]

I didn't know Carbonite had a limit. I have nearly 100gig stored there (in addition to an external drive and my old chock-full Macbook).

I had read a lot of things online that they would just cancel your subscription if you surpassed what they considered to be a "reasonable amount" of data. I remember there was a big stink about it too as they were advertising unlimited storage.

The problem with one of those services for me though is I have a hell of a lot of data and uploading it all would take months on our connection, where in China all civilian upload lines are capped at about 50-100 kps depending on line speed.

I also noticed Amazon has a cloud service. Amazon is a large company and I would feel safer depositing stuff with someone like that rather than some startup with a rocky reputation right now.

But of course Amazon is awfully expensive. 500 dollars for 500 gb, and that would be the minimum I would need to get started with.

 

[rxmd]

I also noticed Amazon has a cloud service. Amazon is a large company and I would feel safer depositing stuff with someone like that rather than some startup with a rocky reputation right now.

I wouldn't rely on that, Amazon S3 has outages too. No matter what you do, keep at least one or two copies of the data around locally.

If you do decide to upload them, well if uploads are too slow where you live, do the upload the next time you travel somewhere with faster uploads. (Nothing beats the bandwidth of a couple of 2TB disks that you carry around with you 🙂)

I keep things on my laptop, an external USB drive and an Excito B3 home server. This is while I'm abroad. At home I have an LTO streamer, even though the 200GB tapes start to get unwieldy.

 

[_larky]

It's important that people realise that RAID is not really a backup solution, depending upon how you configure it. And if you have to ask, stay away.

Glad I saw this thread again, I need to get more prints made...

 

[barnwulf]

I always make extra prints which are stored in acid free boxes with interleaving tissue between each print. I store one copy on my hard drive and a duplicate set on another hard drive in my computer. I have a few backed up on DVDs and need to get busy and put more files on DVDs. Jim

 

[johannielscom]

Yup. I'm on RAID-1 mode, I guess I would need just one more drive in an encasing to swap out with one of the two in my LaCie 2Big. The drive actually has a protocol to copy all data from one still present drive to the next new one when you insert a fresh drive.

 

[yoyo22]

At home I have my important stuff on a Raid-6 configuration in my server. Occasionally I copy the important stuff to another local computer via the local network.
My offsite backup is done via the Livedrive online service. Until now I have backed up 4.3 TB on their servers and had no problems yet.

 

[_larky]

"For how many files would I have the time to do that? My non-photographer friends with children stand a good chance of having nothing left of their kids' early photos except the lousy aging colour prints on the mantle piece."

This is a very serious concern. I've been working on this very problem for a fair while, and it's a tough one. I have a method of preservation achieved technically which was fairly easy to get to, about 3 years work. 🙂 However, the real tough one is to write software that is easy, fun and automated enough that people will use it. And it has to run on any OS, which is tough for an Apple developer 🙂

But seriously, this keeps me awake at night. It's not just family pictures we are losing.

 

[Steve M.]

Negatives have lots of value. I'd hate to think what an Ansel Adams negative would sell for. And I wouldn't count on most photos lasting very long either, especially if they came from a 1 hr lab or an inkjet printer. A properly made fiber print made on an enlarger will last quite a long time though.

Seriously, you should edit those photos down to 200 or so, tops. Then, if you're going digital, save them on 2 hard drives. That's about the best that you could do. And store those negatives properly! That's the real photo.

 

[_larky]

One thing to make sure is not to use optical media such as CD, DVD, Bluray etc. These are not archival quality, no matter what the marketing gumph says.

I agree, make prints, good prints. Get other people to do it, on good paper.

 

[BobYIL]

I have a dedicated P/C for photography only, with 8 HDs in RAID-10; nice backup against any probability. No need for externals..

 

[user237428934]

Seriously, you should edit those photos down to 200 or so, tops. Then, if you're going digital, save them on 2 hard drives. That's about the best that you could do. And store those negatives properly! That's the real photo.

I'm not good at editing. For the time editing i can backup and copy to new hds for a lot of years I think.

 

[_larky]

I have a dedicated P/C for photography only, with 8 HDs in RAID-10; nice backup against any probability. No need for externals..

And fire/theft wont cause loss how?

 

[_larky]

"The downside of backup systems is if something becomes corrupt it can corrupt all the versions you have before you realize it. "

Not really, you can synchronise which will transfer new files, copy over new files, and add secondary files if the new one has changed. But you never delete or over write anything ont he backup, this is how my system works. No matter how corrupt a current file, the backups stay safe. With RAID this is not always true of course.

What we are saying I think is:

a: keep more than one copy of your files, in more than one location.

b:keep RAW, TIFF and JPEG copies.

c: keep archive quality prints of your favourite pictures, in archive storage boxes.

 

[Roger Hicks]

If it's really important, shoot both sheets in the film holder (5x4 inch or above).

Otherwise shoot digital.

Cheers,

R.

 

[dubibap]

Few things, I've learned my lessons and practicing backing up pictures through cloud storage and external memory card. It's always if you have plan A and B. 😀

 

[besk]

The only "back-up" I trust is to print them out. (The important ones- that is.)

I just printed out a bunch.

 

[Dogman]

Prints and multiple portable drives.

Nothing is really permanent.