Tips to Keep Your Photos Secure

If you take a lot of photographs with your digital camera, you know that storage and backups can become a major problem. My wife is a professional children’s photographer and has just shy of 1 terabyte of photos stored on her Mac. Can you imagine the years of photos she would lose if that hard drive failed? Fortunately, there are steps we can take to keep her digital photos secure – and steps we can recommend you take to retain those memories of your kids.

Mirroring the Storage Device

Her Mac is equipped with an external hard drive for all of the photographic storage she could desire. Currently, she has a 1TB external hard drive which will shortly be upgraded to a 1.5TB drive. A second 1.5TB drive will be used and syncing software runs nightly to create mirror copies of the photos on the two drives. We use a software package called ChronoSync which supports everything from backups to mirror copies of files. It’s a Mac only software package, but there are plenty of similar utilities available on the PC.

Occasionally, I will purchase a new backup drive and retain the previous backup drive as an “archived version.” Every month, we switch the backup drives so the archive is no older than a single month. This can get expensive and you will find you have a lot of old hard drives lying around as you run to the brim of capacity and upgrade. I’m still contemplating what to do with all those old USB drives.

Buy Small, Cheap Memory Cards

If you think the days of film are behind us, well, they are, but you can duplicate some of the safety of film by buying large quantities of memory cards and using them as secondary storage. The way this would work is pretty simple: you buy inexpensive 1GB memory cards (about $10 each on Amazon) and fill it up. Download the photos to your computer, but leave a copy on the memory card. Retain the memory card with the original photos on this. This is a very expensive way to do backups, but a pretty secure one – as long as you keep those memory cards in a fireproof safe!

DVDs – Maybe Even Blu-Ray Discs!

DVDs are a very cheap storage medium and can store about 4GB of photos each. DVDs don’t last forever, but likely longer than your average hard drive. If you’re going to use them as a long term solution, burn multiple copies that are stored in different locations, and make sure you replace them with refreshed copies every couple of years.

As Blu-Ray drives become more common place, you will soon have 25 or 50GB of storage space available per disc. The drives are still a little expensive, but the expanded size of storage will help quite a few photographers with a lot of images to retain.

Online Backup Service

We have used several different online backup services over the years for Windows and Macs and have found Backblaze to be one of the best. It backs up external drives – which is very important for our photos – and offers easy recovery options. We use this as a secondary backup solution since it is off-site and happens without any involvement from us. Plus, it’s only $5 a month so it’s really cheap.

Choose Several Solutions

We’ve lost some photos and data over the years as we were trying to come up with the right solution and it hurts. Above all else, we select redundancy as a goal. If I can add another layer of backup to our model, it is worth not losing all of the memories of our girls and all of the photos and videos we’ve collected for many years.

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