Protecting Your Files Overview

I want to keep going on this topic of protecting your files because for all your digital photographs, it is of vital importance, yet there is a lot of bad information out there.

Keeping your files safe is one of those things you have to be on top of all of the time. If your files aren't safe, then you need to act immediately to make them safe.

How you do this boils down to having answers to four questions:

1. What do I do WHEN my hard drive fails?

2. What do I do if my hard drive is lost, stolen, or destroyed?

3. What do I do if I find that one or more files has become corrupt or unusable?

4. How much money am I willing to spend to lower risk level?

I’m assuming that you keep an active or working copy on a hard drive that is attached to a computer. In my mind, this is the “master” copy of a file. It’s the one I’m going to open up if I’m working on a photograph, and the one that I’m going to “backup” and protect with multiple copies in my backup strategy.

There are three strategies that I use to address my four storage questions:

1. Automatic duplication of the working copy

2. Backup of the working copy

3. Archiving

Let’s look at how these solutions answer my questions:


What do I do WHEN my hard drive fails?

This is the most important question because your hard drives will eventually fail. Even new drives fail. And the easiest way to answer this problem is to have an automatic duplication system in place. What I mean by an automatic duplication is, instead of having my files on one literal hard drive, I have it on a RAID-like system (Mirrored RAID, drobo) that automatically creates a duplicate of my file on multiple hard drives when I save it. If a single hard drive in the system fails, the system still has a good copy of my file on another hard drive that I can immediately access, and I can easily add a new hard drive to restore the duplication ability of the system. This is all automatic so I can’t forget to make the duplicate, and I don’t have to do anything crazy to restore access to my files

My goal is to never have the failure of a single hard drive keep me from accessing my files. I also want to NEVER need one of my backups to recover my files. I want to keep my active copy active at all times.


What do I do if my hard drive is lost, stolen, or destroyed?

This is the worst-case disaster question. If you only have one copy of your files, and they are lost, stolen, or destroyed, you’ve lost your photos forever.

The answer to this question is to make backups. Backups are off-line copies of your main volumes, and at least one backup should be stored in a separate location.

The easiest way for a photographer to create backups is to use software like EMC’s Retrospect to do an incremental backup every day to external hard drives. The software will automatically keep track of all your files and backup only the files that have changed since the last backup. Should your hard drive become lost, stolen, or destroyed, it will let you restore it just as it was at the time the last backup was made.

I have at least three “backup sets” at any given time, so I have multiple backups (increased safety) and it makes them easier to rotate offsite.

If you are using a good automatic duplication to protect against hard drive failure, you’ll probably never need your backups. But if you ever do need them, you will REALLY need them. I wouldn’t consider operating without them.


What do I do if I find that one or more files has become corrupt or unusable?

This is answered by having backups and archives. If a file has been corrupted, you need to go back in time to a point BEFORE the corruption occurred. A good backup and archiving strategy should allow you to do this, but it can be time consuming and difficult to find that exact file from the exact date before the corruption happened.

File corruption hasn’t happened to me often, but it is possible. Ask yourself what you would do if a shoot from the once-in-a-lifetime Safari became corrupt...if you photographed it with a digital camera, you can’t just rescan the film.


How much money am I willing to spend to lower risk level?

This is the big one. You could spend limitless amounts of money making your files safe. Multiple copies stored in multiple locations, including underground salt mines, across the world. The National Archives are going to be able to afford a more robust system than you and I, but there is a point of diminishing returns.

With a finite budget, we’ll always have to weigh the cost of each part of our protection scheme against the security it brings.

At a minimum, I want to have a automatic duplication system in place, have three active backup copies, and make occasional “archive copies” that let me “go back in time” to access copies of files as they were when the archive was made.

Is there one perfect system for everyone? No! That’s why I created these questions. They are open-ended, and you need to follow them as deep as they go to make sure you are comfortable with the answers.

That’s all for today, I have some backups that need my attention....