Backup Day

It’s the beginning of a new year, which means today is major backup day. I am kind of a backup nut. Mostly what I worry about are my photos, they aren’t replaceable. All my photos are automatically backed up to my NAS every night, so I have two copies of everything at home. I also back up the full quality photos on my webserver, and lower quality versions that I share with family on PicasaWeb and Shutterfly. Around the first of the year I burn all my photos to DVD and bring it to work. I have a stack of DVDs at work. One from each year and each containing all my digital photos at that time. It leaves me plenty of copies should a disc go bad.

Everybody needs a backup plan if for nothing else there photos. Every hard drive is going to die someday. With photos all going digital, they aren’t going to last as long as those old prints and negatives. My backup strategy my seem a bit extreme, but it really takes no time on my part.

I use Cobian Backup on my Windows Machine to backup my photos and other things to my NAS and then to my webserver. There are a ton of free online storage sites, but I just use my webserver since I have it anyway. It gives me more control and don’t have as many limitations. I use ChronoSync to do the backups on my Macs.

I use Google’s Picasa to manage my photos on my PC. I use it to upload photos to PicasaWeb and Shutterfly. I also use it to burn my backup DVDs.

If you don’t have a backup strategy, it should be your New Year’s resolution. You wouldn’t want to lose all your photos when your hard drive fails.