In this continued guest post Brent Bloodworth IT specialist extraordinaire of Binary Rescue and Binary Business talks about securing your digital images with redundant backups!

Preventing Disaster: Backup Systems

All backup systems are based upon a simple concept. It is not if you will a failed storage medium, it is simply a matter of time. Awareness, preparation and discipline are the keys to an effective backup strategy. Be aware that you will experience a failure, be prepared to mitigate this failure and be disciplined enough to maintain the system. Fortunately many hardware and software backup systems make the process easier.

My work systems are a mix of Linux and Mac systems. I am sure that more than a few of you are running Windows. Fortunately the hardware solutions I recommend are platform agnostic. The software however is dependent upon your computing platform. Where I can I will recommend a specific product for your backup system. Where this is not possible I will describe the requirements of the software.

First thing first, plan on keeping your data on hard drives. Although hard drives are prone to failure the advantages of implementing a hard drive based backup system outweigh the risks. A properly designed backup system maintains several copies of your data to ensure that if one layer fails your data is safe in the next layer.

In the case of digital photography the first copy of your data exists on your camera. The next layer of protection comes from making sure that you copy your photos from your camera to a computer as soon as possible. Do not rely solely on memory cards as they can be lost, damaged, stolen or overwritten. Additionally either invest in software such Apple’s Aperture, Adobe Lightroom or something similar. These programs will maintain a catalog of your photos allowing you to keep multiple versions or edits of a photo while ensuring the original remains intact. Next you need backup software that performs automatic backups on a regular basis. The Time Machine software on Mac OS X Leopard is a perfect example. This type of software allows you to go backwards in time in relation to your files. For example imagine that on Monday you started editing a photo and then got sidetracked. When you return to work on the file a couple days later it looks like someone else deleted the edited copy. Backup software would allow you to retrieve the edited copy from Monday. Software of this type acts as your second layer of defense.

The third layer of defense prevents data loss due to a hard drive failure. The ideal situation is a desktop computer. In this case you can add hardware RAID that makes two identical copies of every bit of data automatically. In the case that a hard drive fails your computer automatically switches over to the remaining good hard drive and allows you to replace the failed drive. You should install your operating system, all of your programs and keep your data files on this RAID array. The technical name for this type of RAID setup is RAID 1.

So far we have protected against accidental deletion, software errors and hardware failure. The next step is protect against the nasty stuff. An effective backup system must also protect you from theft, fire, natural disaster and etc. The way to meet this requirement is conceptually quite simple, move a copy of your data as far away from the original as possible. The systems to achieve this can be very expensive, but for home users a simplified solution is workable. The backup software that we mentioned before needs a place to store the backups it creates. The best place to store these backups is on a external hard drive. These can be found at any electronics store. There is one secret to this step. You should purchase two of these external drives. Each week you should switch them out and take the one that is not attached to your computer to another safe place. This safe place could be a friends house across town or a safety deposit box. One final note, these external hard drives should be twice the size of the hard drives in your computer.

If you have any further questions regrading backups please feel free to contact me via email at brent[at]binaryrescue.com

Photograph XSERVEs + RAIDs by Random Activity