First Of The Month; Data Backup Day!

End of the summer season (click to enlarge)

Fujifilm X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 55mm; 1/680th sec. @ f/8; ISO 200

The first of every month is data backup day for me.  It is something I don't want to forget so I have it entered, with a notification, in my mobile phone calendar and well as my iPad calendar.  The first of the month is the day I bring in my offsite backup hard drive and back up all of my images and data from my desktop computer, which is where I keep and edit all of my photos.  This monthly backup supplements my automated nightly backups that use a little program called Second Copy.  It works well for me.  My data is fully protected.

My question to you is do you value your images enough to back them up regularly and in more than one place?  Do you care enough about all of your time, money and efforts you have put into creating your image library to back them up in case of fire, theft, flooding, technical failures, lightning strikes and even something you could accidentally do to completely erase all of your photos?  I hope you do.  I won't even address the people who put all of there images as well as other important data on their phone and don't back it up.  That is shear.....well, it is far from a smart thing to do.

My advice is to create a simple plan, it doesn't have to be complicated, obtain some free software (shareware) and automate the entire process of backing up all of your data every night.  With these little programs it is very easy to set them up to do everything automatically.  (Some choose to continuously backup as changes are made instead of once per day.)  I have an external USB 3.0 hard drive to which my backups go every night.  Hard drives today are not very expensive so buy one large enough to hold all of the data you anticipate creating over the next few years.

Once you have your automated backup strategy in place, then buy one additional external hard drive that you can bring in once or twice a month and plug it in to back up all of your data and images to that as well.  Then remove that hard drive from your premises.  All this doesn't have to be sophisticated or complicated.

UPDATE:  I had forgotten but most of the external USB and Firewire hard drives come with backup software already installed.  That is another option to make things even easier.

Once you have everything in place, it is almost no effort to fully backup your data to at least two places, one of which isn't right there at your computer where the backup drive can be stolen, flooded, struck by lightning or otherwise destroyed if all of your other computer gear is destroyed.  You want three copies of your data in case somehow the first copy gets corrupted, then the second copy gets corrupted during the automated backup process.  Your third copy, offsite, is safe and secure.

Your pictures deserve at least this minimal effort!  Don't you agree?  I would hate for you to lose all of those irreplaceable family moments! 

Have a great weekend!

Thanks for looking. Enjoy! 

Dennis A. Mook 

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