What If You Lost All Your Digital Photos?

Hey photographers, this question is for you.  Where are your photos stored?  Are they all on a single computer?  Are they backed up?  Where are the backups stored?  What if you lost them all?

Our neighbor's house burned a couple weeks ago.  Thanks to a heroic neighbor, they all got out safely.  However, their house and contents didn't fare as well.  A demolition crew is currently tearing down the house and piling everything in large construction dumpsters to be hauled off.  By this time next year, they will be back in a brand new home, with new furniture, clothes, dishes, TVs, computers, etc.  All the material things can be replaced.  What about the digital things that were in the house?  Computers and hard drives don't hold up very well to fire and water.

If you had a disaster in your home or office, how would your digital images fare?  Would they be gone forever?  Unless you have backup copies somewhere else then fires, floods, broken pipes, etc. can wipe out your images and local backup copies.

I have all my digital image files on a Network Storage System (NAS) with RAID drives where they are protected from failure of the hard drives.  Other disks are backed up every night.  Sounds pretty safe, but all those copies are in one location.  Recent events have gotten me thinking of off-site backups. My plan is to buy some external hard drives, copy all my important files to them and store them somewhere outside our home.   This solution is only as good as my diligence in keeping the off-site copies up to date.

I've looked into backing up my files to the cloud.  The problem is my internet connection is limited to  3 Mbps upload speed. It would take about a month to upload my images to the cloud.  Then, every time I come home from a trip I would have to upload a thousand or more images.  This doesn't sound sustainable.

What are your solutions for protecting your digital image files from disaster?

Planning For a Disaster

There are natural disasters occurring around the globe all the time.  Just last year there were floods in Colorado, fires in California, a mega typhoon in the Philippines and 760 confirmed tornadoes in the US.   These events can wipe away in an instant what we have worked for years to build.  Many times people are able to prepare and there is not a great loss of life, but that's not always true about property.

Recently a family in our neighborhood lost their home to a house fire that from the outside appears to have consumed pretty much everything in their home.   The good news is they all go out safely.  This is the fifth home to burn in our little neighborhood since we moved in about 32 years ago.

Mt. Cammerer Firetower

This house fire got me thinking.  What if that happened to us?  Most of our material possessions would be replaced by insurance but somethings can not be replaced.   There are some steps that can be taken to prepare for a house fire and avoid people being injured, however there is not much we can do to protect things in our home, particularly those things we use and don't want locked up somewhere.    I also got to thinking about the tens of thousands of photos I have on my home computer.

Right now I have 3.4 terabytes of system and data disks, plus  3.2 terabytes of backup disks.  Every night my system makes backup copies of my files.  When (not if) I have a hard drive crash I can buy a new one and put all my files back.  Because all these disks are in the same physical place a house fire or a waterline break in the kitchen above my computer could destroy the original files and all the backups.  All gone.

I decided to find a way to save my photos should a disaster occur at home.  I checked out out a couple online backup services to backup my files to "the cloud" on the internet.  In theory, if my PC is destroyed I can eventually replace it and restore all my important files to the new computer. I loaded a 30 day evaluation copy of one of the leading services and found it was going to take a month to back up what I had on my hard drives! With the number of images I load to my PC after a big trip this system could take days to catch up.

I have decided to give up on the cloud backup until my internet service provider offers better upload speeds.  Instead I purchased a portable hard drive that can be attached to my PC via a USB 3.0 port.  I then back up my pictures, documents, music and other important files to this disk and store it in my office at work.   A low tech but low cost solution.   The key is to be disciplined to bring the disk home periodically and make a new backup.

I'm going to keep doing my backups on my computer in addition to the offsite backup.   Nothing wrong with doing both.

What do you do to protect your important files?