Photography Backup Solution
Having redundancy is essential in your digital photography workflow. Data lost is not frequent but shit does happen. There is a saying,”never put all the eggs in one basket”.
No 1: Backup starts in your camera.
Most cameras now have a secondary card slot. Set it up as a backup so that pictures taken are written to both cards. Some will suggest writing RAW to 1 card and JPG to another. As for me I pretty much just have them both backup on the secondary card.
No 2: Computer backup
After copying files from your card to the computer, there are many options to backup your data. From External HDDs, NAS or even Cloud Storage. Currently, I am using a combination of External HDDs, Cloud and 4 Bay External Enclosures. Below are some personnel experience and thoughts on the different backup solutions.
Cloud Solution will be great if you don’t want to deal with any physical hardware. Some cons are like Internet upload speed maybe an issue if the size of your projects are very big. Maybe cyber security. Remember the iCloud photo leaked? Free cloud storage is mostly under 20 GB. The most I am aware of is Mega having 50 GB. As of writing I realised that degoo is currently the most with 100 GB free. If you shoot RAW then you may have to go with paid service as the free option is likely not enough. I do use Cloud backup from time to time
NAS, I was using Drobo back in 2009-ish. It was relatively “cheaper” if you compare to NAS like Synology or Qnap. I was quite happy for a while till drives keep failing one after another. (Some of the HDDs that failed in Drobo are now in my Mediasonic 4 Bay Enclosure and they are still working fine!!!) One thing about Drobo is that they use their proprietary Raid system and when the data is rebuilding you can’t access them so there is nothing you can do but just wait and hope the data can rebuild itself. There was an incident that Drobo took about 9 or so days to rebuild my data. After that I am done with it. One day I may give NAS another go but likely other brands.
External HDDs, is what I use for my current project backup. As of writing, I am using a Western Digital MyBook 4 TB External HDD. Reliable, cheap and does what it’s suppose to do. 4 TB is more than enough for my current workflow. I may consider 2 bay Raid or Cloud versions in the future.
Currently I have 3 Mediasonic Probox HF2-SU3S2 4 Bay HDD enclosure (Non Raid). I pretty much use them for archiving completed projects therefore I don’t turn them on 24/7. And I do keep 2 copies of each completed projects in 2 different HDDs. You can Raid them to Raid 1 in OS X but I guess I just want to keep it simple for now.
