Saved by a CD
September 14, 2006
We’ve all been there… working on a document, computer crashes, document gone. No backup. Not so bad if it was just a ½-page, but really bad if it was your 300-page graduate thesis. What about loosing 10-years of family photographs?? Now that would really, really suck. Being a professional digital photographer these days means having a skill set that goes way beyond creating a great image. Of course there is the business side of photography, but what I’m talking about is the technical computer side that is now wrapped into the photo business. There is probably some ratio of how much time I spend on my digital workflow compared to each image I make, but I’ll just say it’s a lot. And it’s a bit tiresome; I mean I’d rather be shooting than doing daily backups. I’ve been shooting digital since 1998 and my backup methods have changed with technology.
First it was CDs, then external hard drives, then DVDs. But as everyone knows burning CD’s and DVDs takes time and is viewed as a hassle. I wanted a completely automated, real-time, backup system. So about 2-years ago, after much research, I installed a RAID system on my desktop. A RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. I purchased 4, 250-gig hard drives. Two of the drives (500-gigs) would be one volume, and the other two would be the backup (this is known as mirroring). All 4 drives were “mapped” together so it appeared as one giant volume. In addition for speed, the data was split evenly across all the drives. Every time I placed an image on the main volume, the RAID system would automatically copy that file onto the backup/hidden volume in real time. If one of the 4 drives failed all I would do is get a new one, pop it in, and the volume would rebuild itself with no loss of data. This has been great. No more time consuming backups to other types of media. I was loving life…. until last week…
“Hi Didrik, yeah, uh, this is Marcus calling with the damage report.” Marcus is a computer technician at my local computer store. I had taken my desktop in for two reasons, (1) I had maxed the storage out on my RAID and needed more space and (2) one of the drives had failed. The request to Marcus was simple. Install 4, new 500-gig hard drives, RAID them together, and copy the data from the old drives to the new drives. After dropping the computer off, my last words were, “Oh yeah, just FYI, my life’s work is on this machine.” Two days later, a surprising damage report came in from Marcus. For some reason the entire purpose of the RAID system (which was automated data redundancy) had failed along with the one bad disk. Needless to say my stress level is through the friggin’ roof. It’s 8:41am in the morning as I write this and so far Marcus has recovered 50% of the data.
In a panic yesterday I remembered all the CD and DVDs I used to back up on. They were in a box in my basement. While I didn’t back up everything I did backup the most valuable images which will continue to sell as stock for years to come. If I lose all the data I will be able to personally recover about 70%, but really the last 2-years of shooting will be lost. Some of my data backups on CD was luck in a way. I only did that because I was in the field with my laptop and making daily backups on CD. This was before everyone had a 300-gig portable external hard drive. What’s the lesson here?? A single electronic backup is not enough; always do a third backup on some type of permanent media like a CD or DVD.
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