News and Views from Dave Wilson

Getting my (backup) Ducks in a Row

by on Mar.21, 2010, under Photography

OK, using a title like that is a pretty feeble way of working my picture of rubber ducks from the Austin Rodeo Carnival into a post but it does describe what I’ve spent a fair bit of time over the last week doing, namely sorting out my data backup strategy.

Until a couple of years ago, I had a pretty haphazard backup strategy. Important images and data were written to CDs or DVDs, saved on USB sticks or copied to another machine in the house. As my image library began to grow and as I started selling images, I realised that this would not work and that a more thorough backup policy was required.

At that point, I was changing my main work PC so the old PC became a backup server with a couple of external USB disks and a new internal drive providing the storage I needed.

All was well until I had my first hard disk failure. Thankfully, I didn’t lose any data but I did have to spend a couple of weeks reinstalling applications and getting my main PC back to its previous working configuration. At this point, it was clear that something was required to prevent this in future so I did some research and bought a license for Acronis TrueImage which allowed me to generate incremental backups of the complete hard disk image. In the event of a future disaster, I should be able to “reinstall” everything in a matter of a few hours just by restoring the image backup.

Even with this in place, I was vulnerable to the kind of catastrophy that we hope never occurs – a house fire, tornado or other calamity that would result in destruction of our home and its contents. To guard against this, I signed up with BackBlaze last year, a company offering great software which runs unobtrusively using background CPU cycles to upload your hard disk contents to secure storage on the web.

At this point, all the pieces were in place but I was concerned about local data reliability. In an ideal world, I would love never to have to deal with data loss and backup restore due to the death of a hard disk so I’ve just added another layer to my data protection by adding a Drobo as my main server drive. This unit, currently configured with 3.75TB of storage, is now my main data drive and offers the ability to swap a failed drive without loss of data. As a side effect, I can also swap smaller drives for large ones to allow upgrade without spending a lot of time shifting data around.

So now my backup strategy looks something like this:

  1. Data I’m working on stays on the laptop hard disk. It’s backed up to a local USB drive daily using Acronis TrueImage set to generate incremental backups of the whole disk. Image data is also further backed up to another USB disk during Lightroom import.
  2. Once I’m finished working on a batch of images, they are moved to the server-connected Drobo which is set to be backed up to the network using BackBlaze.
  3. The Drobo also holds an Acronis TrueImage backup of the server main disk, updated incrementally every week (on the grounds that I don’t change the disk contents anything like as frequently as the laptop). This is not currently backed up to the network since it contains no critical data and the Drobo should be safe enough to protect against the failure of the server hard disk.

The only missing piece now is to add an automated backup system for my wife’s Mac since she is currently doing manual backup copying to a network drive. Time for a bit more research…

2 Comments for this entry

  • ssphillips
    March 21st, 2010 on Mar 21, 10 | 9:49 pm

    Hey Dave,

    Great article, but I argue that you are missing another key component. You have all your stuff backed up in one location, so if something happens to that place (fire, flood, theft, etc.) you are vulnerable to losing everything all at once. I think you need an offsite backup in addition to everything you have now. This could be as simple as a USB drive that you update on a monthly basis and that you store offsite (at a friends house, at the office, in a safety deposit box, etc.). there are many online backup services as well, but these aren’t cheap for the volume of data most photographers have to deal with.

    Just my 2 cents!

    Cheers, Sean
    .-= ssphillips´s last blog ..My Photography Workflow =-.

    Reply
  • Dave Wilson
    March 22nd, 2010 on Mar 22, 10 | 8:21 am

    Sean, it looks like you missed bullet #2. I use BackBlaze to back everything up to the network to guard against just this type of catastrophe.

    Reply

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