With apologies to John Huston (Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948), yes you most certainly need backups.
Let’s go out on a limb for a moment…. it’s a pretty sturdy limb, so we’re not taking much of a risk. Over the next few years, if you haven’t already you’ll hear with alarming frequency, horror stories of people losing years worth of photos stored on their home computers.
A generation ago the family photographic archives were contained in one or more large photo albums, Today they are more likely to reside as ephemeral magnetic clouds on the platters of your home computer’s hard-drive. How can you replace images of your child’s first birthday, their first day at school., or graduation? What value do place you on the pictures from that once in a lifetime family trip?
Ask most people what one thing they would grab if they had flee their burning home, most people invariably respond, “our pictures”. Today that more than likely means grabbing their computers on the way out the door. Fortunately most of us will never have to deal with the tragedy of losing our homes to fire. It’s pretty easy however to predict with absolute certainty that somewhere along the way you will experience a hard-drive failure. It’s really not a question of “if”, but simply “when”. Add to this the fact that the vast majority of home computer users do not backup their important data on a regular basis, if at all, and perhaps you can see the impending disasters that await those who think they don’t need a backup strategy. Those that don’t apparently have lots of company… 68% of home computer users don’t backup their data with any regularity, if at all.
Backing up a personal computer is the most often ignored and yet most important action you can take to safeguard your family archives. It can be time-consuming and require a level of discipline most of us have not the time for or, with an expenditure of under $150 can be an automatic process that happens while you sleep. Those that do backup their computers on a regular basis do this by copying important files to CD or DVD. Certainly better than no backup, but the process cannot proceed unattended, and there is concern about the long-term viability of both the physical media, and the file formats used to write to these optical media (I have heard stories of CDs becoming unreadable in less than 18 months). Tape drives are another alternative, and with appropriate software can run unattended in an automated nightly backup, but they are expensive, slow to restore lost files and can be complicated to set up.
The best solution currently available for my money, is an external USB hard-drive. “Why,” you ask, “would you want to backup an ephemeral magnetically-encoded mechanical device, with another ephemeral magnetically-encoded mechanical device?” Its true that hard-drives used as backup devices are just as prone to failure as the drives used as primary storage, the statistical probability that both your primary drive, and your backup drive failing at the same moment is extremely low.
Now that I have (hopefully) convinced you of the need for regular backups, and the the most cost effective way to accomplish the task, let’s look at at how to implement this strategy. External USB hard-drives are sold by most major manufacturers. Seagate, Western Digital and Maxtor are examples. My personal prejudice runs to Western Digital, as over the years these have proven to be the most reliable drives I have used. (In another life I was responsible for administering a corporate network… beginning in the mid ’80s I have used just about every common brand of hard-drives with a variety of hardware and operating systems, and have experienced more drive “crashes” than I care to remember). A 250Gb external drive will run you about $CA120 to $CA180, depending on where you live and where you choose to purchase the drive. A 250Gb drive is probably more than most people will need for a while, but dropping back to a smaller drive really won’t save you much, so you may as well have the extra capacity… you could always use it to back up other computers you may have in your home.
Using one of these drives couldn’t be simpler… just plug them into an AC outlet, and plug the USB cable into an open USB port on the backplane of your computer, and both Windows and Macs will recognize the drive and assign it a drive letter, which on a PC will be visible in “My Computer”. If you want to, you can now simply “drag-and-drop” your folders of images on to the drive icon, and backup your images in this ad-hoc fashion. A better approach, since most of us, myself included, lack the discipline to perform this task an on regular basis, is to automate the backup process to occur unattended each night. Most USB drives, such as those from Maxtor, and Western Digital come with a free backup utility that will allow you to accomplish this; simply choose the folders to backup, and specify your new drive as the backup destination, select a time for the backup to occur (every day, in the middle of the night), and your done!
I recently had the misfortune to experience a hard drive failure. However the recovery was a simple process: purchase and install a new drive to replace the failed drive, and restore the drive information from the previous night’s backup. A few hours later the failure was a fast on its way to becoming a distant memory. One last point. I make it a habit of always unplugging my external backup drives and placing them in a detached garage on our property whenever we are going to be away overnight. This off-site backup ensures that if by some misfortune we were to lose our house in a fire while away, all of my image files would be safe in this off-site location. Likewise if the garage burned, the original files would be safe in the main house.
If you add one thing to your digital photographic arsenal this year, make it an external backup drive, and use it religiously.