Dangers of Digital Technology

[Angus]

I currently have over 12gig of digital photos on my hard drive, and I don't even much like digital photography (though I admit my Nikon DSLR is rather nifty). That's quite an effort to back up, and I do quite rigirously make two backups...one to DVDs every 3 months and one every day to an external HD.

Wow. Why are you copying the same photos every day? And a new set of DVDs every 3 months... That has got to be some kind of world record. I had no idea people were that backup-crazy! 8O

Because I take photos of some sort or other almost on a daily basis. That's how I come to have 12 gig of digital photos. I also tend to use the largest capacity card any given camera can take and its highest quality jpeg setting. If I were to leave the backup for a week, I would lose something if there were a problem....100% guaranteed, because I add to the photos more than once a week. And you just never know when your main hard disc might fail.

They are organised in folders according to themes, and subfolders...for example within "my photos" I have "people " subfolder "friends" then various further subfolders for photos of hanging out with friends....I have "holidays" but within that "Spain", "short breaks", "USA" and others. If I add something to "Spain" I just find it easiest to back up the whole "holidays" folder.

In my case I actually use Norton Ghost to run an automated backup of "my documents" every morning at 3am, because usually nobody is using the computer at that time. I try to also backup the photos to DVDs every 3 months, just in case. I buy DVDs in bulk so we're talking a few pennies here. Might well move over to Blu-Ray now, one BD-RE disc can hold 25 gig so a backup onto physical media isn't too bad...though will likely take 2 hours to burn!

And then there's the 5 file boxes of negatives.....

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

You could use something smart for copying files. I would recommend "Teracopy", you can find it here: http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

With Teracopy you can choose to overwrite all file with the same filename, or only if they are older, or to skip all files with the same filename. So you could just drag and drop your folder with images and then click to skip all files with the same filename.

That would save a lot of unnecessary copying and overwriting. And when you are done copying, you can "check that the files are OK" with CRC.

And you should definetly have your drive mirrored, or in a RAID5 setup. Everything I have that is important (my photos, client footage) is in either mirrored drives or in RAID5 redundant arrays. So even if a drive fails I loose nothing. If the data is corrupted, when then I guess loose it, but that is what backups are for. The mirror/RAID is just for the day-to-day safety, the backups are for bigger things, things that I don´t fiddle with every day.