So many people (including myself until recently) fail to back up all of their photos (not to mention other documents) regularly. Every (and I mean EVERY) hard drive will eventually fail. It is only a matter of time before the disk drive your photos are currently residing on will fail. If you do not back them up there is a very good chance that one day you will lose them all.
Hard Drive Failure Can Leave You Pulling Your Hair Out
For years I have been preaching to family and friends about how easy and important it is to backup regularly, while secretly knowing all my data was not fully backed up. Sure I occasionally dumped everything from my laptop onto an external hard drive but I was never sure I had everything backed up as I had photos scattered around everywhere.
Another massive disincentive for me to make regular backups was not having an easy way to deal with files that I had either deleted or amended on my laptop. When copying to my back up drive did I want to replace the files already there? I didn’t know what to do and as a result I backed up less and less frequently. Until recently…
Here are my photo back up tips
1. Move all of you media into one place
The first thing I did was went out and bought a brand new external hard drive. I then spent the whole weekend going through virtually every directory on my laptop and my old ‘back up drive’ and cut (not copied!) all the directories containing photographs onto the new drive. Naturally as I did this I deleted duplicates and renamed the folders to something sensible as I went.
I now store ALL of my photos on that new external hard drive.
2. Promise Yourself to Develop Good Habits
I got my photo collection in such a scattered mess because I had no defined work flow to follow when importing photographs from my camera. Sometimes i created new folders and imported them into MyPictures folder, other times it was my Desktop, other times it was on my laptops second hard drive and finally sometime i saved them straight to my external hard drive.
Now I have a strict routine I follow every time I import pictures. I import all photos into a new directory inside my MyPictures directory. I then sort through them and delete any I deem worthy of not keeping. I generally run through them a couple of time to ensure I have identified all of the ‘keepers’. Only then do I move the photos to my new external hard drive, renaming the new folder with the following naming convention ‘YYYY-MM-Event Name’.
3. Use Back Up Software
I back up my external hard drive every night when I am asleep, onto my old external hard drive. The software I use makes this incredibly easy and is the reason why all of my backup nightmares have gone away.
Every time it updates (currently nightly) it only updates files that have been changed, or deleted. This way my backup is always an exact up to date copy of my photo library and I never need to worry about conflicts.
There are lots of specialist back up software solutions out there. The one I chose was the excellent Genie Backup Manager.
Summary
I feel a bit embarrassed that I delayed putting a regular backup solution in place for my photographs for so long. In reality it is such an easy thing and not very expensive. In my opinion the price is well worth paying to avoid losing all of my photos to a hard disk failure.
I realize what I have outlined above only secures me against hard drive failure and not against theft or perhaps a house fire. To over come these risks I intend to implement an ‘off site’ backup, either by using an on-line service or another external hard drive that I store at a secure location (such as a family members house). More to follow on this…
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