Backing Up Your Photos - From an IT Perspective

I've seen a few posts around the web recently that talked briefly about how to back-up your photos. Most of them just briefly touched on the subject, and some of them were just plain wrong. So I thought I'd put together a post about backing up, from the perspective of someone who works in IT.

Hard Drive Back-Up

Probably the easiest and most affordable method of backing up your photos is to use an external hard drive. The cost of external hard drives has fallen quite a bit over the last few years. The average price of a 1TB external hard drive is around $100 - $125. 1TB = 1,048,576MB so if all you use the drive for is backing up your photos you're looking at the ability to store around 69,000 pictures (given an average file size of 15MB).

While backing up to an external hard drive is great (I do it all the time), it shouldn't be the only back-up you make. Why? Hard drives fail. Its a fact of life. Ice cream melts and hard drives fail.

DVD Back-Up

All of my photos eventually get backed up to DVD. DVDs vary in size from 4.7GB for a single-sided, single-layer DVD to 17GB for a double-sided, double-layer DVD. Nearly every computer today has a DVD burner, and DVDs are pretty cheap (roughly $15 - $20 FOR 100). So for around $5 you can back-up about 320 pictures on a 4.7GB DVD or around 1100 on a 17GB DVD.

There are 2 advantages to this. First, if you use those DVDs solely for back-up, not for showing your photos off, they'll last for longer than you will. Second, you can store your back-ups offsite. Offsite storage of backups is the recommended method of storing backups in the IT arena. This keeps your back-ups safe in the event that something happens to your building.

On-Line Back-Up

On-line back-ups are another great way to back-up your precious photos. The number of offerings out there for on-line back-ups is staggering. Mozy, IDrive, Dropbox and Box.netjust to name a few.

The beautiful thing about this is that most of them give you tools to help automate your back-ups, provide an easy method of keeping your back-ups off site and if they are any sort of reputable business, they have their own off-site backups, which include your photos.

What's the Best Method?

Given the three methods described above, what's the best method to back-up your photos? The best method is any combination of them. Don't rely on just one, personally I use all three.