Backing Up

Years ago, I shot an important to me event and had thousands of photos. I went through, edited them, catalogued, and tagged them. Made sure everything was nice and labelled... And likely deleted something to make space for more photos. A few months later, I went to find the work from this weekend and it was gone. I lost the entire event. The raws, edited photos, all of it.

Let me say, there were words said. A lot of them. I'm still cursing that. But in doing so, I have also put a lot of effort towards creating a back-up system that I have put to the test in Canada and on my international travels. I would like to break it down for you.

What is the 3-2-1 back-up system?

3. copies of your data.

2. copies at home on 2 separate mediums.

1. copy saved offsite.

Part 1: Primary Copy

The heart of my data management system is an unraid server that is at home. It is built from my old computer, a ryzen 1600, 16GB of RAM, 1TB NVMe for a cache, and (4) 4TB hard drives in a RAID 1 array. Over the 3 years that I have been using it, I had one hard drive have a minor issue, and it's still running tickity-boo... knocks on wood.

Using a VPN, I am able to remote into my server from anywhere in the world and copy my photos to it with minimal hassle.

Part 2: Second Copy

The second copy is a Windows machine that copies the photos to it's storage (should they be on something other than hard drives... yes. I didn't say it was perfect). It is also what I use to edit photos when I am at home. This can be whatever you want it to be. If you felt so inclined to have tape, blu-rays, or baller with NVMe storage. Or your standard working copies.

Part 3: Offsite Copy

The third copy is on an online storage service. I personally use sync.com because they are Canadian and are priced very fairly. I can upload my photos directly to Sync from my laptop, and I have it automated to upload photos from my windows machine, and more importantly, download photos. It is fairly hands off, which is nice. I also really like Sync because I am able to share and maintain sharable links with ease. It would be nice to have Linux integration, given my immense disdain for Windows and what they are doing.

When I am Traveling

I have my photos on both my laptop and a portable hard drive, and the original SD cards (fool me once), and when I am able to, transfer my photos to my home server or Sync. After they are for sure transferred, I feel safe enough to delete the photos off of the SD cards. Given how much those run now, I am not running out and buying new ones every time I fill them.

It's nice because every computer - and my phone - can access my all photos. It doesn't sound like much, but having that freedom to access everything on the go is great when I am out for months or years at a time.

There are plenty of off the shelf options for you, depending on your tech literacy and energy to put into making something. The important bit is ensuring you have copies of your important data, because in today's digital age; when those 1s and 0s are gone, they are gone. And so is all of your work.

Look after it, and it will look after you.