Ridge

For a professional photographer, one’s archive is a record of work and campaigns, a portfolio, insurance policy, and potential goldmine. Having worked so hard to stock the archive, it doesn’t make sense to neglect to back it up and let it wither away on an ageing hard drive.

My instinct is to remain unencumbered by equipment because it uses up working capital for other projects, it costs to maintain and to store, will depreciate in value and eventually cost time and money to dispose of. I also wondered where backup ends, because in the event that my backup drive explodes, should I have an off-site backup just in case?

For these reasons, I decided against a Drobo or any other physical backup and decided to back everything up online in ‘The Cloud’. My internet package gives me unlimited up and download so it makes sense to use it and there are plenty of services available. If anyone knows about backing up their backups, it’ll be a backup company, so I’m happy to leave it to the experts.

After a bit of research, the service I plumped for is Carbonite. They provide unlimited online backup for $49.95/year (circa February 2009), which makes less sense since the fall of Sterling, but is still cheaper over 7 years than a Drobo and by that time, I’ll be able to try something else.

My 80gb, 7200 ide hard drive took about a week to back up, but only because I switched it off at night, when more bandwidth would have been available. A typical assignment of 1gb takes about 24hrs to back up, during which the photographs are backed up on my laptop and compact flash card. Once evaporated to The Cloud, I can wipe the flash card.

For the future, I’m looking at Solid State drives, which, without moving parts, are promised to be ultra reliable, perhaps obviating the need for backup, yet thinking about it now I don’t think I’ll cancel my subscription just yet.