How do you back up your photos?

[TxHockeyGuy]

Being a sysadmin I'm a little anal about backing things up. Here's my photo backup process.

1. Copy images from camera down to laptop.
2. Upload images from laptop to website hosted elsewhere.
3. Nightly backup occurs from website to server at my home.
4. Remove images from Camera.

By doing this I have all of my pictures on my laptop, my website, and my local server. That gives me a pretty good amount of redundancy and ensures that if my apartment ever burns down I have all my photos. I do something similar with my data only there are extra encryption steps involved.

If you're looking for cheap web hosting which will allow you somewhere to upload all your photos check out www.ixwebhosting.com. I'm not affiliated, just a customer.

 

[Mike Veitch]

on trips i put them on the laptop and copies on 2 seperate travel 80gb drives. They don't travel in the same bag.

When i get back to the office they go to my 500G RAID drive, a 300GB external, and a 400GB external, then copied to DVD.

Then i wipe the travel HDs

 

[Jeff Toorish]

I was just backing up a few final photos from this year minutes ago.

I shoot Canon Raw in all my cameras.

I make a CD, DVD or DL-DVD of each event. That means if I shoot three different things in a day, I make a different CD, etc, of each. These are stored in chronologic order in a regular CD file notebook.

Then I convert them into the format in which I will be most likely to use them. So, for example, if I know these are going to print, I convert them to TIFF. If I know they are going to web, I convert them to Jpeg. Those converted photos go onto a Maxtor external hard drive. I have several, when one fills up, another comes online.

If it is something particularly important, say a documentary project, I would probably make a second back up on another CD of the TIFF, as well.

When I travel, I use a laptop that burns CDs and DVDs. I store the photos on the Laptop and also burn a CD. In addition, I often take small external hard drive and store them to that as well, so I can store things in different locations.

One point about backing things up, keep the two backup files in different locations. If there is a fire or (less devastating) a flood, having all your images sitting next to each other in two backup media won't do you much good.

There is really some logic to making a third backup that goes into a safe deposit box or something like that, as well.


Jeff

 

[ThatsSomeBadHatHarry]

Every photo taken gets to the laptop.
But only favorites make it to my photobucket.

sounds like I should be looking into external hard drive. Thanks.

 

[Diver Dennis]

I travel with 80GB and 250GB hard drives along with my laptop. When I get home I dump them all on one of two 500GB hard drives. I have another 250GB portable that I keep edited files on, along with copies on my main computer. I keep some edited ones on my laptop in JPEG format so they are small files.

 

[hlsooner]

Main archive is on eight hard disks running in a RAID 5 array. Also, a complete backup copy is made once a month and stored on a separate external hard drive kept in another location.

 

[Gilligan]

It's not "if" a hard drive fails but "when".

I have two portable hard drives in addition to the one in my desktop. All my photo originals are on all three drives.

 

[boydski]

It's not "if" a hard drive fails but "when".

I have two portable hard drives in addition to the one in my desktop. All my photo originals are on all three drives.

Gilligan is right on both counts. The drives on my PC are "mirrored" and one did fail during a recent power outage, but I was able to recover from the other drive.

I use two portable drives for backups as well. One stays in a fire-proof media safe and one stays off site.

 

[timle]

linux to the rescue - my computer files are stored on a drive I mount to my PC provided by samba on my linux box, my wife also has a share on this samba server. These files are backed up nightly via rsync.

This covers my photos, music, documents, etc.

 

[CompuDude]

Camera to laptop, laptop to desktop. Desktop gets backed up nightly to a removable HDD. Good (enough) shots get uploaded to an offsite web host. THEN the memory chips get erased.

And I still need to burn my collection off onto DVD from time to time, and store them at my parent's house or some other offsite location in case of fire or other local disaster.

At a minimum, I would back up onto a removable hard drive, but it's safer to have at least one more method.