Back up digital images

Next to completing a self-assessment tax return, backup and archiving has to be one of the most tedious tasks going.

Which is, of course, why many people don’t bother and why those who do put it off for as long as they can. If you’re one of those rare sorts who has a clockwork system of rotating daily, weekly and monthly backups for your digital image and video library, congratulations. If you’re still with me, my guess is that you’ve got years’ worth of photos and videos spread across several hard drives.

Some of these may have been archived to CDs and DVDs on a sporadic basis, but there nonetheless exists that horrible nagging doubt that if everything died on you there’d be a lot of precious memories that would be, well, just that; you would never see them again. Photo archiving is a much more personal affair than other data storage issues.

What suits me may not suit you ­ – a lot depends on how and why you take pictures and what you do with them afterwards. For those who make and use images professionally, backup is, arguably, more important than for a personal photo collection and what works for a wedding or event photographer may not be the best option for a casual snapper or committed amateur photographer.

Here I look at some of the issues involved in backing up and archiving your photos, discuss some of the available options and talk about how I do it.

A picture of organisation
I take photographs mainly for pleasure, but also for my work as a graphic designer and to illustrate books and articles I’ve written. In 2007 I took just under 7,000 digital photos (a surprisingly small number and fewer than I took in 2006; I must get out more). For me, the main issues with archiving are security and ease of retrieval.

Primarily I need to know that my photos will be safe and that the media on which they are stored won’t degrade or fail so that I am unable to retrieve them. When I do need to access my pictures I want to be able to locate them quickly. The key to the first issue is redundancy.

You can argue all you want about the useful life of hard disks or the longevity of optical media, but the only sure way to be certain that a media failure won’t destroy a large chunk of your archive is to keep more than one copy. The solution to the second part is organisation. The more you do initially to organise and tag your photos, the less time you’ll spend looking for them and adding essential metadata later.

I store all my photos on a single external Seagate 300GB Firewire drive. So far this has been large enough to accommodate every photo I’ve taken in the 21st century and still has room to spare, though with higher resolution RAW files this is unlikely to continue to be the case for long. This drive is included in my regular backup routine and I also archive new material at the end of every month.

I use Retrospect Professional for regular backups (see the attached picture), and copy the monthly folders using a DVD-burning application. I feel more comfortable with my long-term photo archive DVDs in a format readable by the computer’s operating system, rather than tied to a particular piece of software.

Increased capacity and reduced storage costs mean it’s now possible for most of us to store our entire photo library on an accessible hard drive. Sometime soon I’m going to have to upgrade the external drive to something larger, but even if dSLR sensor sizes and my annual shooting rate both double, I don’t see continued online storage of my photo library being a problem.

Being able to keep your images online has obvious advantages from the search and retrieval perspective, but if you’re restoring from a backup these options won’t necessarily be available to you, and that’s where organised filing can help.