In the tech world it is world backup day. Digital cameras have made it so easy to take photos that we snap away every chance we get. Maybe with a phone, maybe with a point and shoot, and for some of us with a DSLR.

Yesterday I printed out a bunch of 4"x6" pictures. We have a printer that can run from battery (a Canon PIXMA) that I wanted to test out. I haven't even used it in a couple of years (or more). In fact, not only was the printer long discontinued but even the 4x6" paper I used (an Ilford Pearl paper) isn't made anymore. My expectations for success were low. But, without even replacing the ink cartridge, it ran like a champ.

I haven't printed out 4x6s in a long time. Our clients don't ask for them and I don't think to print them for myself. This was throw away stuff (sort of) because I had low expectations for success to begin with. It was a blast. I just printed and printed.

The problem these days is that almost all of our photos are stored digitally. We still shoot a lot of film but most people don't. We don't print everything. What do you do when your computer goes belly-up?

For us, the digital files of our clients are our bread and butter. So, we have a lot of backups. We try to shoot with cameras that record to two memory cards at once. We backup on location (if we're out long enough). Once we're in the office the diagram shows how the data flows. Each box outside the workstation represents a copy.

The scenarios:

1) Workstation dies. Use timemachine and load on new station like nothing happened.
2) Workstation dies and timemachine dies. Load from RAID. Annoying but OK.
3) Office floods - pull data from offsite storage 1.
4) Office floods with statewide power failure. Move to new location pull from offsite 2.
5) Office floods, secondary problem effects off-site locations (different states). Get mobile - pull from cloud.

That's the theory anyway.

We have so much data we are constantly upgrading the capacity and quality of the components. So this map may change. But, when a drive fails, as we had last week, you are glad you're running a RAID (which is a bunch of mirror image disks). When a RAID disk fails you just plug in another disk and it is like it never happened (hopefully).

Of course data storage can be time consuming and expensive. It's also annoying and can be very frustrating. I have more hard drives than I ever wanted. I get annoyed at buying new drives all the time. But, it's still cheaper than losing the data. Some of those memories are irreplaceable. As we speak I am backing up one RAID to another RAID.

So, if you're at home and you have your photos just on your desktop - you should buy an external drive and use some backup software like Crashplan. It's free for local use and they have a cloud capability as well (we don't use their cloud). You can also consider something like Dropbox. It's a space online and on multiple computer that looks just like a folder on your machine. But, when you drop a file in your dropbox it propagates all the machines that share your dropbox and to the online cloud storage. I think there is even a mobile app. Pretty cool stuff. Hit me with questions if you have them.