Tech Tuesday - What's Your Backup Strategy: Part 2

Let's talk data backup strategies.  Not interested?  You should be.  If you read last week's blog post, you should be at least a little worried about backing up your data and developing a strategy to protect it from many different disaster scenarios.  Today I'm going to tell you what my new backup strategy is.  Please, keep in mind that this is what works for me, but it might not be what works for you.  I'm offering this as a starting point so that you can consider if you need more or less protection.

Since I am a photographer, protecting my digital images is a top priority.  I tried to consider a few different scenarios when devising my backup plan.  I think that I came up with a good compromise between safety and sanity.  I'm confident my images will be safe, but I don't have quadruple layers of protection and redundancy (OK, maybe I do, but no more than quadruple!).

Here are a few of the things that I considered and had to work into my backup strategy:

• Images should be immediately backed up once they are uploaded to my computer.
• An archive of all of my images should be kept off site.
• My Lightroom develop settings for every session should be backed up.
• Final images should be backed up in full-resolution.

So, what did I come up with?  I'll tell you.

• I'll always have 3 "active" external hard drives.  Two (HD1 and HD2) will be hooked up to my computer.  The third (an exact copy of HD2) will be kept at an off-site location.
• Once I upload photos to my computer's hard drive, Lightroom automatically makes a backup to HD1.
• SyncBack SE will continuously monitor my computer's hard drive and will mirror any changes to HD2.
• As soon as I upload photos to my computer, they exist on three different hard drives (plus the memory cards until I format them)
• SyncBack will also back up my Lightroom Catalog every day to both HD1 and HD2.
• That means it will exist on three different hard drives at all times
• Once I'm done editing photos, I will export the photos as a Lightroom Catalog and burn it to a DVD for archiving.
• This means I have all of the RAW files plus my edits in one place.  Technically I could put that DVD into any computer with Lightroom installed and it would be no different than editing them on my computer.
• I'll also export the images as full-resolution JPGs and upload them to my Smug Mug site, where I can download them from anywhere I have internet access.
• Every week or two I'll swap out HD2 with the copy that's kept at the off-site location and make sure they're both synced.

As you can see, there is a bit of redundancy here, but since most of it is automated, it's not really much of a hassle.  Once I'm done editing a photo shoot, I'll have a copy of the edited photos on my computer's hard drive, two copies on external hard drives, one copy on a DVD and a copy of all edited JPGs in cloud storage.  I think this is going to work!

If you have any questions about what I'm doing or why I did something, feel free to leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer you right away.  I hope this has inspired you to rethink your backup strategy.  Regardless of if your data is professional or personal, you'd better back it up.  If it's not backed up, one of these days it's going to be gone for good.