This is another one of those very quick tips that’s going to take me a long time to say.

The tip itself is very simple: Back up your data! Your photos don’t really exist until they exist in at least two places. Hard Drives fail. Optical Discs rot. Floppy Discs are tiny. So what do you do? You make sure that you have multiple copies of every single one of your important files. And you really should have one backup copy of all your important data that is quickly and easily accessible, and another copy that is stored at an off-site location that can’t be affected by the same flood, fire, or theft that could get the other two copies.

Hard Drivesare cheap. If you just consider your backup drives as part of your photographic kit (just like the camera, lenses, and these days the computer too) then you will be in a much better place mentally when it comes to buying them. You need all of these things in order to successfully create, manipulate, and preserve your images. It’s just that simple.

How to Backup

This is the long part. I’m not going to tell you how to backup your photos and other important documents. That’s up to you. But I will tell you what I do, and why I do it. Unfortunately, because my system is so robust it is also quite complicated. And that takes a long time to describe…

I recognize that most people won’t even come close to doing what I do. But I hope you will do some of it, because (say it with me) “All Hard Drives Fail“. Even if you only do some of this it will be much more likely that your data is safe.

• First of all I keep the original copies of all of my important documents, data, and recent photos on my laptop. I would prefer to keep absolutely everything on my laptop, but laptop hard drives simply aren’t available that are big enough to do so; therefore, I can only keep my recent work on my laptop and older stuff must be stored elsewhere.
• My laptop and my desktop are connected via a network and I do automatic backups of all my important documents so that they are readily available on either machine. The frequency of these backups varies depending on the type of data.

  The automatic backup is done using AJC Directory Synchronizer. This is a very powerful program that allows you to choose exactly what you want to backup and where you want it to go. It is easily scheduled via the Windows task manager so you can create multiple jobs with appropriate frequencies for each job. I have used many similar pieces of software over the years and I’m much happier with this one than I was with any of the others…

• I have 2 D-Link DNS-323 Network Attached Storage (NAS) cases that each contain 2 Hard Drives. One of the drives in each NAS contains my entire photography library (including the recent work from my laptop), which I can access directly over the network from either computer using Adobe Lightroom or Windows Explorer. The other drive in each NAS contains all of my other data and documents. I do an automatic backup every week to copy everything from the primary NAS to the secondary NAS. This backup syncs any additions, deletions, or changes to any files on the primary. I do this weekly because that provides a nice buffer in case I make a mistake on either of the computers and it gets propagated to the primary NAS before I catch it. I then have a few days to recover any necessary files from the secondary NAS.
• This next part may sound crazy to some of you, but it is actually the most important part of my backup strategy… I use a portable USB drive that contains another copy of absolutely everything, and I store this drive off-site. This protects me in case of fire, flood, or any other major disaster that would impact my house, and which could potentially destroy all of the other backup copies at the same time. I only update this drive every few weeks, so there is always some exposure to losing my most recent files, but I have years worth of work stored on this drive that will always be safe.

  This drive can be stored at your workplace, at a friends house, in a safety deposit box, or even in your vehicle (as long as you don’t park it in the garage attached to your house!). The important part is that it must be an off-site backup, and therefore you have to get it out of your house. With this drive stored somewhere else, my absolute worst case is that I lose a few weeks worth of data.

  Note that I even go to the extreme of taking my secondary NAS off-site prior to bringing in my external drive!
  

Note that if you have a relatively small amount of data, a system like this could easily be created by using 2 inexpensive USB Hard Drives. These are readily available for under $100 if you need 1TB or less. You could use one drive as your primary backup and the other as the off-site backup. In fact this is exactly what I did for a long time before my storage needs outpaced the USB drives that I had. One benefit of using the NAS cases is that they are directly connected to my gigabit ethernet network, and I really like the performance and speed that the NAS is capable of.

The beauty of this system is that it can be easily upgraded by replacing the portable hard drives as your storage needs get bigger. These drives get bigger, faster, and cheaper all the time. Depending on how much storage space you need, you may never have to do this. Or you might need to start off with a multi-bay NAS right off the bat if you already have lots of data and you don’t have a good backup system.

So even if you only get one backup drive, and even if you only backup your data every once in awhile, I hope you are doing something. Do whatever works for you! Feel free to drop me a line if you need some help setting up your backup system!

I have several old laptop hard drives that I use in cheap USB drive enclosures for backing up or sharing data. These things are great and then generally just work, even though you can buy them for as little as $3.82 from Amazon!

I recently plugged one of these drives into a new computer and, although the drive initially worked, it randomly disconnected after only a few minutes of use. I was only able to get it working again by unplugging it and plugging it back in. Once again it disconnected a few minutes later. This cycle continued as I tried to troubleshoot the problem by changing power settings, switching USB cables, switching USB ports, and testing the connection of the drive in the enclosure. Nothing I changed made a difference and the random disconnections continued every few minutes.

It finally occurred to me to try reinstalling the device driver for the HDD. So I uninstalled the driver and rebooted Windows. After starting back up Windows found the drive, installed the driver, and the problem went away.

I don’t know what caused the issue in the first place, but uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers worked perfectly. This is a good reminder that many USB device issues are driver related and can be resolved by reinstalling the drivers. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the Device Manager (click the Start Menu and type “Device Manager” in the search window)
2. Navigate the Device Manager menu to the device in question. For me this was a “Disk Drive”
3. Select your device, right click on it, and choose “Uninstall”
4. Reboot and see what happens.

Note that this issue and resolution is essentially the same for all recent versions of Windows, including XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (at least ).

If you’ve ever had a hard drive failure you’ll know exactly why I’m writing about this topic. If you haven’t, know that you will, and I hope for your sake that you will be prepared for it. Hard drives die. It’s a simple truth, and not a matter of if, only when.

Backing up your stuff is a very personal thing. I probably go way overboard on this, but I’ve made a conscious decision that I don’t want to lose any of my important files, ever. Mostly that means my original images and other photography data, but it also includes all of my other important documents such as personal letters and financial and tax data. I even include the settings for some of my favorite and most important software iin this category. I have all kinds of presets and defaults for Lightroom in particular that would be just plain painful to figure out how to reset if the main drive on my computer were to fail, so I make sure to back that up too.

Backing up your stuff doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive. You don’t need to run out and buy a NAS box (network attached storage) to connect to your home network, and you definitely don’t need to shell out the cash for a Drobo (but that would be awesome!) or a hardware Raid system.

Backing up can be as simple as buying a second drive and manually copying your important stuff over every couple of weeks. This could be a second internal drive in your desktop machine, but these days it’s far easier to pick up an inexpensive external drive that you can connect via USB or Firewire.

Using a simple backup strategy like this will protect you from a single drive failure. Keep in mind that this will only protect the data that you have up to date on the backup drive, so if it’s been a couple of weeks since you did your most recent copy, you may still lose a lot of files. For me that would likely be hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of new photos. It’s also important to be aware that this will only be protection against a drive failure. It won’t protect you from a natural disaster such as a fire or a flood unless you store the backup drive somewhere other than in your house. It’s easy enough to keep it in your shed, your car, or over at a friend or relatives house, but doing so makes it that much more likely that your most recent backup will be from weeks ago instead of just days…

A much better strategy would be to buy two external drives. Keep one of them connected to your computer, and store the second one at an off-site location. Use software that will automatically copy your important files to the connected drive at regular frequencies, and swap out the two drives every couple of weeks.

Although my personal backup strategy is much more complicated than this (in order to ensure absolute redundancy), the basis for it is essentially this second alternative. I like to do a backup every night using a an automatic backup program called “AJC Directory Synchronizer“.

There are many other programs out there that would also do the trick, but this one works and it’s not very expensive. Windows users should also check out “Cobian Backup” (it’s free!). I’ve never used it but it gets great reviews.

Of course Mac users should check out “Time Machine” and “Super Dooper“. The combination of these two systems working together will make your life so much easier than anything available for Windows…