You've finished your tour, and placed your precious digital photos on your computer. Of course you want to reuse the digital media for your camera, so you clear the media and continue shooting more pictures.
The question? Is one copy of your photos enough? What if the hard drive on your computer decides to misbehave and you can no longer access it?
I know that anything can happen in the digital world, and I've always kept backup copies of my pictures. I started out by burning CDs, but as my digital camera insists on taking more and more pictures, I found that CDs became very annoying because of their size. Another option if you like backups on external media is to switch to using DVDs as a backup media. Just for a size sanity check, I looked at a site that sells both types of media. As of October 2, 2005, I found CD capacity at 700MB and DVD capacity at 4.7GB. That's quite a difference.
Another option, and the one that I moved to in 2005, is an external hard drive. I use a Maxtor OneTouch connected to my computer via USB. The drive I bought was listed as 200MB but the actual storage capacity is 189GB.
OF course, that's still within my own home, and off-site storage is a good idea too.
I added a second Maxtor OneTouch drive in May 2006, and it lives (most of the time) in my office - my own personal off-site storage. Why? Well, my home computer is a (circa 2002) laptop with a 30 gig hard drive. That amount of storage was fine until recently. Well really, until I added my new camera and started taking more and more pictures. I finally reached the point where it wasn't feasible to keep all of my photos on my computer in addition to on my Maxtor drive. And part of the reason for the backup drive was to have a second copy of everything (in case of failure). It had also been bothering me that my backup was in the same physical location as my computer. Time for another drive...
I also decided to remove the human piece of backing up my photos (and other files too). I did that by purchasing Second Copy from Centered Systems - http://www.centered.com. I set up the backups to the drive that lives next to my computer to run automatically; the backups to the drive that lives in my office are set up to run manually. And by manually, I mean that I need to click on the backup profile and tell it to run. That's much easier than my previous habit of trying to remember which files were changed or new and needed to be backed up!
If you upload your photos to a site for printing, you could consider that a backup site. Of course that depends on how long the site allows you to leave your photos on the site.
I use smugmug as a way to share my photos with others. In essence, that also serves as off-site storage for the photos that I uploaded. My smugmug galleries (which can be seen at http://denise.smugmug.com) don't contain all of my photos though, so if I really wanted it to serve as a full backup I'd need to upload more of the photos. As of right now, my smugmug galleries contain over 2000 photos, and I don't think that I can deal with uploading all of the photos that are not currently there - nor do I want to bore my viewers with multiple photos of essentially the same thing. But knowing that I have a good sampling of my photos at an off-site location makes me happy.
My earlier galleries have less photos than my later galleries. An example? The galleries that I created for my recent tour of Prince Edward Island contain about 400 of the 800+ pictures I took during my two-week trip.
I have started to see ads for backup services on the web at what appears to be a reasonable cost. I can't give you a recommendation on a specific service since I haven't used one myself, but I was able to generate a list of possible services by doing a search using the words off-site computer storage service. If your backup needs are small (in terms of the amount of storage you need) then using a service might make sense. If your digital camera continues adding to your photo collection, your storage needs may exceed reasonable prices for a service like this. In that case you may be better off with a solution like the one that I chose - using an external drive and storing it off-site.
Update on May 14, 2007: As I noted above, I have photo galleries on SmugMug, so my photos are partially backed up there. I use two external drives for a backup media at home and at my office, but I find there are many occasions when both drives are at home. And what if something happens? OK, OK, I guess I'm just nervous, but really, what if...
The folks who run SmugMug have been very open about the storage mechanism that they use for our photos - Amazon S3 - and recently one of the folks there posted about a tool that could be used to backup files to Amazon. This offsite backup seems (to me) to be a reasonably priced option. If you're interested, here are links to information:
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) - from Amazon's page "Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.".
- JungleDisk - tool used to access Amazon S3. This tool is free during beta testing, and is targeted to be available for a $20 one-time fee once beta is completed.
- Amazon S3: Show me the money - blog entry about SmugMug's choice of Amazon S3, written by Don MacAskill, SmugMug's CEO & Chief Geek (his wording on the title, not mine!).
Update on May 29, 2007: Ah, it's a good thing that I had the information on S3 in the back of my mind! Just a week ago, my computer informed me that there were errors on one of my backup disk drives. Uh oh! Now I only have one backup copy, not the two I want to have. And as I said before, having an off-site backup is a very good idea. I signed up for Amazon S3 that day, and I'm in the process of uploading files to S3. Happy...
Update on July 9, 2008: If you happen to be keep photo galleries at SmugMug, your photos have always been backed up in multiple places (since they also use Amazon S3). Last month they announced a new product called SmugVault. This service allows you to backup files other than your photographs. The storage mechanism for this product is Amazon S3. For now I have opted to keep my SmugMug galleries and my full backups separate - since I am already using S3. If I was starting from scratch right now I would probably consider the SmugVault option.
As usual, there are many different answers, lots to think about. But I'd encourage you to keep backup copies of your precious digital pictures.
