The Perfect Backup Strategy Part 2

In an earlier post, I spoke about back-up and the need to develop a system that does what it needs to do – save your data from all potential loss, and allow you to get back up and running in the quickest possible time.

Photographers have special requirements with regards backup. They generate huge volumes of data in a very short time. It would be in no way unusual that in one photo shoot, I might generate from up to 4GB of data. And this is data, that if lost, is totally irreplaceable. The sheer size of it as well precludes online backup strategies for most, as upload speeds are too slow, and adsl account limits are often 20GB or less (this is of course only an issue if your ISP includes uploads as part of your allowance).

Peter Krogh, the DAM (Digital Asset Management) specialist, talks a whole lot about backup strategies in his book, The Dam Book. I’m not going into that much detail here, but there are a few things that are worthy of mention. There are many considerations when designing a backup system, including cost, scalability, and redundancy. With regards cost, he gives very good advice when he says to ‘buy the backup you need now, not in 18 months.’ I spent months looking into backup systems, including expensive raid arrays and JBoD boxes and home servers etc… That was because I was focussing on scalability more than cost. But all those solutions were too expensive, at least for me. I couldn’t justify the expense. So I thought about what I needed right now. And that was basically 1TB of storage. The quickest and cheapest solution would have been to just buy a cheap internal drive and an enclosure, and hey presto, a 1TB USB external drive. But the build quality of many cheap enclosures is suspect, and for a very similar price, you can get a entry level external drive. Then there is the question of interface. USB 2.0 is the basic requirement, but there’s also Firewire 400 and 800 and eSata (forget NAS devices for the moment).

In the end, I decided to take a small step up and get a WD My Book Home Edition. It has a triple interface (USB, Firewire 400 and eSata). I finally realised that there would be no instant implementation of a perfect system, and that it would be something I developed over time. My immediate requirement was to safely secure my data. I already have a 320GB external I built myself. That is now my secondary off-site backup, which is placed at a neighbours house. When I do a shoot, I backup to the 1TBdrive, and then go and collect the 320GB drive and backup to that, and then return it to the neighbours house. There’s my data in 3 places, one of them off-line. That is a secure backup.

But then there’s my system drive. At the moment I have my system drive ina  RAID array (Raid 1- mirroring). This is a great solution in the event of a total drive failure, as I have an exact copy ready to go. But what about OS problems? Recently I had a terrible security failure in Vista, which meant that the OS was basically kaput and needed to be re-installed, something I didn’t want to do. All those programs, all those settings… But I realised my mirrored drive now had exactly the same problems. Hmmm… So it seems to me, I need a complete mirror image of my drive to be backed up to an external drive whenever I make any major system changes or updates, and to have that stored offsite as well. So that means another external drive, and a program like Norton Ghost to make a mirror image. That has to come soon. Then, I should feel a little more confidant, that when (not if) a drive fails or the operating system decides to die, it will only be a new drive and a few hours, and all will be back as it was. That’s the idea anyway. Am I missing anything?