Computers and hard drives crash from time to time. Viruses destroy files, and poorly written software sometimes has bugs that cause files to be erased or modified. Accidents happen that end up deleting or writing over the top of other files. A drink spilled in the right place could cause a short circuit in your computer causing damage to the hard drive.

Bottom line is that there are an infinite number of ways that your photos can be lost, and if you don’t back them up regularly, you’re asking for problems. If you don’t have a backup solution, now is the time to get a plan going to keep your photographs safe from harm.

Most Basic Backup Solution:

A backup solution can be as simple as burning your pictures regularly to a DVD or CD. A DVD burner costs about $35 now, and disks are cheap and can hold a lot of pictures (about 4.7GB worth or over 900 5mb image files.). The DVD burner will come with software to save files onto your disks, which is usually Nero Express so you don’t have to buy additional software. Windows XP and Vista also have a built in program to burn disks.

To keep this organized, you can use Excel or another spreadsheet to keep track of what is on each disk - especially if you keep photos organized info folders. For example, you could put your nature photos in one folder, your portraits in another, etc. Or you could put all of your vacation photographs in one folder and somebody’s birthday party in another.

If you don’t have at least this basic solution, set a goal to have this set up and going within the next month. Your hard drive is a ticking time bomb that will eventually die. You owe it to yourself to make sure those photographs are backed up.

Software Management Solutions for Photographers:

Once you have your DVD burner and are comfortable burning your photos to disks, you can take the next step and invest in a program to help organize your photos.

ACDSee is one such program and comes in two varieties. The basic Photo Manager and the Pro version. Both have the ability to organize your photos and burn them to a disk, and they’ll store a thumbnail on your computer so you can keep track of all of your photos and which specific disk they were archived to.

ACDSee 10 Photo Manger is the basic version and is normally $49.99, but if you use the coupon code 10PM20 before July 1, 2008, you’ll get a 20% discount.

ACDSee Pro 2 Photo Manager is $129.99, but you’ll get 20% off if you use coupon code 2PRO20 before July 1, 2008.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is $299. It’s not only an organizer, but helps streamline your workflow. If you do any professional portrait work, it will speed up your proofing process (aka showing the pictures to your client to determine which to print).

Lightroom’s biggest competitor is Express Digital, which is more like $1300 per license. Express Digital has gotten better over the years, but their service hasn’t had a good track record and their software has had a lot of bugs so beware if you want to use them.

Traditional Backup Software:

Backup software as a whole is a pain to use and usually pretty expensive, with one exception. Symantec Ghost, known for making backup disks for a computer, is a great way to keep your entire computer backed up. The way it works is that it makes a file that they call an “image”. This can be a complete image of your entire computer, or an incremental image, which means that it only contains the files that have changed since the last full image was made.

Typically, an IT Department will use Symantec Ghost to take a snapshot image of a newly formatted computer with all the basic software needed for each department in their company. For example, all of the customer service reps at a call center will have the same software so they’ll make one image. This way, when a computer dies, they’ll use the image to restore that computer. Restoring only takes a few minutes, where reinstalling Windows and all of the software can take hours.

However, as a backup solution, what I do is create a full image once a week of my computer and save this file to an external hard drive. The image file is going to be huge since I have a lot of programs and photographs, so I can’t just burn it to a CD or DVD. Hard drives are pretty cheap now though so it’s not that big of a deal to have a big external hard drive. Then, each day of the week, I make an incremental image, which is anything that changed since the last full or incremental backup. Each new week, the full backup is overwritten by the new one, as well as for the incremental ones.

You can even browse the images to restore a single file if you want.

The beauty is that if you have a good image of your hard drive, and you get a virus or install some software that messes up your computer, you can pop in Ghost and restore the image, and you’re back to where you were in about 15 minutes. Same goes if your hard drive crashes. Put a new hard drive in the computer (or have somebody do it for you), and restore from your image and it’ll be like you never had a problem.

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Brian Broderick is a semi-professional nature photographer living in northern Utah. Frequently, his nature photography trips include the Wasatch and Uinta mountain ranges and the southern Utah deserts. He is the owner of The Lens Flare, a popular community of fellow photographers and artists.

Tags: backup solutions, Photography

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Help, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.