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Backing Up Your Images by Gabi
With the rise of digital photography came many positive changes for the professional and amateur photographer. Aside from the ability to manipulate images with an ease not seen in film photography, digital also lowered the cost of producing images. A negative change, however, has been how much more complex and costly it is to store and protect those images. As we all know, it isn't a matter of taking film and filing it away indefinitely anymore.
There are a variety of ways to store your work. As many are slowly coming about to discover, CDs and DVDs have a limited shelf life. According to Popular Photography, it is not really known exactly how long the images will last on these storage media. It is thought they could possibly last 25 years. Still, it is recommended that data archives be refreshed every 5 years or so.
Other storage devices include external USB or firewire hard drives, network drives, internal drives, and RAID drives (which, simply put, consist of multiple drives which mirror each other to create backups in case one drive should fail). A new storage tool that is generating a lot of buzz these days is the Drobo, which allows the user an infinite storage space limited only by the user's choice of internal drives. The Drobo has 4 bays and one can purchase internal drives to insert in it. As the drives fill up, the user can remove the full drive and insert a new one. The Drobo shell sells for $495. To learn more about the Drobo click here.
Once you've decided on your backup equipment of choice, then you need to determine what your backup protocol will be. A recent thread on NoBS, regarding backup procedures illustrates different methods that NoBS users have implemented to safeguard their work.
Also in this thread, NoBS member Williams Photo provided an invaluable link for a free and reliable backup program for Windows users, called Replicator. This is the link to the download. The program will handle regular backups according to the schedule set up by the user and will back data up to whichever drive is assigned to it.
Whatever your poison may be for backing up, remember that it is important to have a storage protocol in place in the event that you experience hard drive failure. Your business and your clients depend on it.