Backing Up Your Entire Library Of Images and Files, Pt. 1

Hello and welcome to my blog.  Today’s post is part one in a series about backing up your images and my thoughts on what you need to do to back up your entire library.

If you are like me, you are a person that loves to make lots of pictures. I like to shoot raw and I like to shoot at the max resolution of the camera. Doing so seems to leave me to most flexibility in the future when I decide what I will use a particular image for. Therein lies the problem, if you do this you are going to be using a ton of space to store all of your images.

My library is made up of several catalogs containing over 100,000 images, so I have a huge tower that holds five One Terabyte hard drives for storage, and two 100 gig SSD drives for my OS’s. The problem is, I have now filled up all of my hard disk space. I used my drives for storage, and my storage is now full, which leads me to this post.

I am in the middle of a huge undertaking because I need to back up my storage drives. I tried to burn optical media several years back, however that was not a good solution as the DVD’s aren’t going to be a media type that will last due to natural elements & deterioration, as well as being a format that will fall to the way side.  In my life time I have seen 10 different media types become obsolete, DVD’s are no different.  Not to mention DVD’s are small in capacity and just dont hold much information.  When you are dealing with Terabytes of data generated from the creation of stills and HD video, hard drives are the only way to go.

I say Hard drives are the best option for a few reasons, first is cost. Dollars vs. Gigabyte standard Hard drives are the cheapest and they are fast. Also you can set them up in many ways so the data is saved in a redundant manor (raid 5) thus making the data very secure with respect to hardware failure.

I am starting to see the world of computing move to cloud based solutions and I’m not happy about it. I do not want any company to have access to my files, ever. I do not want to spend hours and hours trying to put files online.  As fast as a cable modem connection is, transferring 5 terabytes of data will take a month of Sundays to complete. No, I want my files at my finger tips, safe from prying eyes, and instantly accessible if I need the data. You see it’s my data, I created it and now I am reasonable to manage it.

Hardware solutions aren’t cheap. A five terabyte array will set you back $600-700 depending on the quality of components you choose. I plan to build to large arrays in the coming weeks. I will document the progress of my project. I will explain the process that I choose to back up my storage and why I chose it.

As I type this post I am planning on building two, Raid 5 arrays as well as a hot swapable station for individual Two terabyte hard drives that will become my instant backup for all future imports of images to my Catalog/library in Lightroom. When I import any new images I will check the box that sends a copy to the hot swap two tb drives, when they are full, I will wrap them in a static bag, label them and put them in a fire safe.

In closing, I want to talk about what my heart is telling me. I have all this data and it is backed up two times, it’s all saved safely. I put all this effort into archiving all those digital files. But all of those files are useless in a digital form, yeah I can access them and turn them into something, and they are digital forms of a ton of memories, but to me they are almost worthless. I think every image should be a print, a piece of art, on a tee shirt in a magazine, ect.. When the image is made into a tangible form (like a print) it has finally made its way to the world to be enjoyed. Maybe, just maybe, then it’s time to set it free (delete it).

Now I know not all of the files need to be set free; your best stuff should be backed up, re-backed up, and backed up again.  Various formats of the files should be created, and multiple copy’s of those files should be archived at various secure places off site.  I got it, but the ones that I think need to be freed are all of the other images that fill your hard dives 20 megapixels at at time.

This ends part one, I will revisit this topic as my arrays come to life, if you have had to deal with this or you have any questions on this topic, feel free to comment below. I would love to hear from you, Thanks for taking time to read my blog. Thomas Shue