Back Up Your Photos! Now!

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Matt
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We touched upon this several times in the past, and I know that a lot of you still don't thoroughly and promptly backup your photos. So here's a topic to keep us all reminded, help improve the way we backup, sort, and retrieve photos.

The topics of discussion:
*Do you back up regularly?
*If your photos hard drive crashed today, would you be able to recover? How much time would you need to recover?
*If your workstation here to be lost due to flood/fire/theft/etc., would you lose your photos?
*If you lost all your photos, what would you pay to have them retrieved?

I used to burn my photos to DVD every 3 months or so. That was it. Maybe a few times a year I would make duplicate copies of the DVDs and bring a set to work, just in case.

I bought a 1TB USB drive a few years ago and began using Microsoft's SyncToy to back up to it. It was a manual process and often threw errors. I would wait months inbetween backups and when I did, it took so long and used so much resources, that I kept putting it off.

Upgraded to a eSata Bay last year when I built my computer. It basically is an external hard drive adapter that takes internal hard drives. I can buy the cheaper Hard Drives and just plug them in (just like putting a Game cart in a Nintendo). I picked up two 3 TB drives. One to back up and store on my desk. And one to back up my photos and bring to work, as an offsite backup in case my apartment burnt down. A long-lasting fail-safe solution for about $350. That didn't last. I bright a backup copy to work. Kept forgetting to bring it home to refresh it. eSata connection made it faster, but backups were still cumbersome enough to make me not want to do it.

I began using Dropbox a while back to upload my phone photos to. It's the perfect solution. Automated, regular, and accessible anywhere. For 1.2TB of photos and 300GB of NYFalls assets? Dropbox's personal accounts have a max of 500GB for $500 a year. That's about average for cloud storage. F-that. I'll keep to their free space.

I read a story on BackBlaze on some news site on how they are able to keep costs super low by building their own server hardware and utilizing consumer mass storage devices. When I read "Unlimited storage" I tried their free trial to see what the catches are (for example, carbonite doesn't back up everything... it backs up jpg, tiff, psd, but may ignore RAW files and some videos). Long story short. I have recovered photos (as a test, and for remote access convenience) from the account. I pay month-to month (less than $5) and have an iphone app. I don't back up locally anymore. Don't even think about it. If the BackBlaze icon is in the taskbar, it's backing up. I add new photos, it takes care of it. It's liberating. It's going to be good to have that feeling when I travel, that at night I can copy my pics to my laptop, and have it back up to the cloud overnight, in case my laptop gets stolen, or I lose a memory card.

Downside to cloud backups.... retrieval is not as fast as local. Accessing the archive is slow to initiate. Thumbnails are not yet supported in the desktop client (so if you are looking for a specific pic, you need to know the file name or just pull down folders and search after). The fee is per machine, at least for BackBlaze is it. I'm paying for my desktop now. If i want to add my laptop to the mix, it'll be another $4/mo fee. I may do that just for the months I travel.
Latency is another issue. How long does it take to first back up a few terabytes? A week, maybe more. It depends on the connection. Leave your PC on day and night to get it done quickly. Once it's done, the backup software runs smoothly and promptly gets files.
I'm probably in a better spot with backups than I ever was.

As far as catastrophic recovery, I have insurance. I have a recovery image of my workstation and can roll back. I even have my setup virtualized, so I can boot a virtual machine of my "photostation" on my laptop or another Windows PC.
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Des219
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Good topic. We've discussed it before but it is something easily overlooked.
L_G_D
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Yeah, yeah, Dad, I'll get to it eventually!

I do the same thing, external drives with synctoy, though I never had issues with it, I'm just lazy.
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Matt
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that was my problem. Synctoy is great for us technical people, but you still have to click that button (although you can set up a windows event to have it done automatically when you shut down your computer).. but for the lazy, Backblaze or another online backup service is liberating. Try the trial.

Mozy was another one I looked into. Price is certainly higher though. http://mozy.com/home/pricing/
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Des219
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Asus has AiCloud for some of their Wireless Routers. Basically you plug in a USB Hard Drive (though only USB 2.0) to the wireless router and then you subscribe to their AiCloud and it backs it up to the cloud. Might be a good option for some, since it would give you a local copy and a remote copy.
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