My Photography Backup Strategy
The Hickory High School Varsity Cheerleaders ride an antique fire truck during the 2006 Hickory Christmas Parade…
As a photographer, I have unique requirements for backing up my digital photographs. I make a lot of photos every week, and the sheer amount of storage space required for that is tremendous. I don’t delete anything. I even keep my bad photos just in case there may be some oddball use for them in the future.
The Microsoft Windows operating system creates a special “My Documents” folder when it’s installed on any personal computer. This is simply a logical place to store documents that you create, including photographs. Within the My Documents folder, there is another special folder called “My Pictures” for photographs. This folder is my starting point for saving photographs that I shoot on a regular basis. In my “My Pictures” folder, I have created several folders, but the primary photography folder is simply called “Photos.” Each time I shoot a batch of photos, I create a new folder within the “Photos” folder that is named with the date and subject in this format:
2007-11-12 - Purple Garden Flowers
When I name folders like this, they stay in alphabetical order with the newest folders at the bottom of the list and I have a sequential view of all my current photo shoots.
My PC has two internal 160gb hard disk drives and one external 120gb USB hard drive. Every morning at 3am, my PC runs an automated scheduled backup of the “My Documents” folder to my secondary internal hard disk drive. This process creates my first backup of my photography and any other documents that exist in my “My Documents” folder. The purpose of this backup is to have a recovery option if my primary hard disk drive fails. I can simply replace the drive, reinstall the operating system, and then restore my personal data, including all my current photography. The problem with this procedure is that my hard disk drives are not large enough to keep ALL my photography online all the time. My primary hard disk drive would fill up rather quickly. This is where my external USB hard disk drive comes into play.
My PC runs an automated script every night that just copies the contents of my “Photos” folder over to the external USB disk drive. At this point, I have two backup copies of my photographs. The first backup exists on my secondary internal hard drive and the second backup exists on my external USB hard disk drive.
Periodically, my primary internal hard drive starts to get full, so I have a need to free up some space. At this point, I start copying my older photo shoots in the “Photos” folder to DVD for storage. After I copy them to the DVD, I delete them from my primary hard disk drive, but leave them on my external USB hard drive until that drive starts to get too full. The external USB drive allows me to have up to 110gb or so of current photography readily accessible without having to go back to DVD to get images that I may need. As the external USB drive starts to get full, I delete a few of the older photo folders from that drive to free up additional space. The external USB drive currently lets me keep 4-6 months of my most recent photographs online. I hope to replace the 120gb drive with a 500gb drive soon, which should let me keep a lot more photos active, but I just haven’t done that yet.
This backup method is a very inexpensive and fairly comprehensive way of backing up large amounts of data. The only problem I see with this method is the fact that I’ll have a LOT of work to do whenever DVD is replaced with some other type of storage media in the future. With backups of digital data, I can’t rely on DVD for a lifetime of usability. I have already run into this issue once when I decided that I needed to make my hard backups on DVD instead of CD. I had to load all of my CD data back onto hard drives and burn all that to DVD, which took quite a long time to do. That day will come again when DVD is replaced by something else that is higher capacity and more reliable.
In reality, I could build a RAID-5 disk drive array with a lot of storage space and keep all of my photography online all the time. The fault tolerance of a RAID-5 array is rather good, and the likelihood of losing all my photography would be slim, but not an impossibility.
It’s sort of ironic when you think about how much more complicated it is to back up digital photo files as compared to filing away strips of film :)
I like the way you have automated your backup procedures to occur in the middle of the night, presumably while you are sleeping. :)
However, like most people, you do something I’ve never quite understood. Your folder naming convention begins with the date. At first this seems fine because it organizes the disk in chronological order. But after accumulating photographs over a period of years this organizational structure becomes cumbersome if you can’t remember what year you took a picture or set of pictures you need to relocate.
Instead, I use this naming convention:
XXXXXXYYYYMMDD where:
XXXXXX-meaningful name
YYYY-Year, MM-Month, DD-Day
Within a meaningful topic the sets of photographs are in chronological order just as in your naming scheme. Btw, if a folder does NOT have a date appended then it is an organization folder that contains folders that do have photographs. This results in a meaningful tree structure that organizes pictures by date within topic(s).
Say, for example, I want to select a landscape taken in Sedona, Arizona needed for some purpose and therefore need to review all of them. Here is how I would find it:
Pictures->Landscapes->Arizona->Sedona
Then within that I see these folders:
Church20031108
Sedona20031108
Sedona20040227
Sedona20040724
Sedona20050507
etc, etc.
This way I find all Sedona landscapes in one place. That makes things a lot easier for me. I can always remember the subject matter of photos but not when they were photographed until reminded using this structure.
My PBase web site above is basically organized the same way as my hard disk. That helps to.
Hi Steve…
This is where my Flickr account comes into my loop of organization. I upload something to flickr out of every significant shoot I do and I keyword that so I can find it later. The upload date on the flickr site tells me where to find the image if I need it…
Y’all are complicated. I leave mine in the folders that Canon puts them in. Used to be, I could usually tell by the four little preview images on the folder roughly where I should be looking but now that I’m using Lightroom, it doesn’t really matter. I never use “save for web” so my exif always contains the name of the original file which makes it easy to look up when it’s in file order.