Rescuing Photos and Creating Backups - Safe Storage at a Budget

I have managed to rescue all of my photos, and, I must say, I now have a backup system that is nearly complete. Since this blog is all about becoming a better photographer, I'm going to go through my current process, along with a few future tweaks that I hope to make.

Physical Backups

Not all things can be backed up!

First off, I did a little work and removed the hard drive from my completely dead computer, and installed it into my new desktop. This isn't too hard, and can be accomplished with nearly every type of desktop computer with a simple Phillips head screwdriver. Just make sure that you're not in an environment with a lot of static electricity, and don't bring any magnetic tools into the equation (it's just not worth the added worry). There are tons of YouTube videos that can demonstrate how to perform this process - it's super simple and took me a grand total of 10 minutes from opening the cases to closing them.

Of course, I made sure that I had my new desktop all set up and working before I installed the new hard drive in tandem. Fortunately, when I booted up, the hard drive was perfectly operational, and I was able to do a very simple copy/paste operation. It took some time, but I now had two identical copies on separate hard drives. I then scheduled my main hard drive to back up my photo folders once per week onto the auxiliary drive. Why is this important? If one hard drive should fail physically, I will still have everything on the other drive.

I made a second purchase: a Silicon Power rugged-ized 1 terabyte USB hard drive. If you shop around, you can get a good deal on this. Admittedly, it's a touch more expensive than other 1TB removable drives on the market, but as I plan on traveling with this, I paid the small premium for something that was dirt and water resistant. With photo backups, I would plan on getting a USB 3.0 capable drive for the faster transfer speeds. RAW files add up quickly! Storage is so cheap now that you can get removable drives that are lightweight, portable, and provide nearly the same amount of storage capacity as a standard internal drive. So if that theft or act of God happens to my desktop, I have a small piece of information security tucked away in a separate part of my home with the same data. Just make sure that when you load photos onto the desktop, that you copy them to the removable drive, too!

Next Steps for Improving Redundancy

What I have laid out above is a pretty good system - physical redundancy within my desktop computer. It isn't a RAID setup, but it's similar in principle and should prevent  any data loss due to physical drive issues. Why isn't this enough on its own? Both hard drives are installed on the same computer - should a pervasive piece of malware or a virus get on my machine, it could do damage at the digital level to my data on both drives. How do I protect from this? Get the best available antivirus software you can. AVG is an excellent freely available program (they make a pay version, as well), while Kaspersky Labs is widely praised for making the most complete computer protection out there.

This has nothing to do with data redundancy,
but is my best wide-angle shot to date!

The one bit of added security that I haven't yet taken is the easiest. Cloud storage. There are a number of highly regarded cloud storage services out there - this list is a good start. Your files get stored on a variety of servers throughout the world, and are easily accessible to you on the go. This is the ultimate in redundancy, but comes with a price. If you're like most digital photographers, your megabytes of photos become gigabytes VERY quickly. Most free services will be enough to start with, but, as you take more photos, you may have to splurge for a pay service.

Feel free to add any helpful tips or recommended products/services in the comments, and keep those photos safe!