Digital Media Peril: Redux
August 22, 2007 | By Joel Dehlin | 4 Comments
I received a number of thoughtful responses to my last post (Digital Media Peril) which discusses the dangers of having all of your pictures and movies on your computer rather than in shoe boxes in your closet. Folks should feel free to keep posting comments there, but I’m going to summarize some principles I see emerging in the thread and some additional thoughts I’ve had.
1. Start now. Some solution is better than no solution. The risking losing your pictures and videos is a very real danger. Get it fixed now. There is a risk that if you implement a sub-optimal solution with the intention to “fix it” later that you’ll get complacent and never get around to fixing it. Or that the solution won’t work in 10, 20, 50 years. It’s better to do something instead of nothing and to continue evaluating your solution and looking for something better.
2. Redundancy. Implement multiple solutions to cover yourself in case one goes awry.
3. Online backup. I think online backup is a great way to go: Flickr, Mozy, .mac, whatever. You get the added benefit of easy photo sharing. There is a risk that you’ll put all of your content up on some web site and that it will close down. 1) I think the likeihood that a mass storage web site will disappear with no warning, without someone purchasing the assets & customers, etc., is very low. 2) Create a redundant solution. I think this is a great solution.
4. Share, share, share! Share your media with as many friends, family, neighbors, or co-workers as you can reasonably do without irritating people. The more you spread your media out, the easier it will be to re-create your photo library if digital medial disaster ever strikes.
5. CD/DVD. CDs and DVDs aren’t great long-term solutions, but they’re fine in the short-term. You can buy software which will make them easier to recover if they fail, but you’ll still want to make sure this is a backup, not a primary measure. Make sure you have a place to send discs that is away from your home (work, family home, etc.) Try to re-create your discs every few years as the long-term failure rate of this media is high.
6. Hard Disk. Some people just use hard drives in their home to back everything up. This is a quick solution which is easy to automate. It doesn’t give you offsite archival, and hard drives can fail, just like discs can. But it’s a great backup plan or redundancy strategy.
7. Prints. Pictures are still wonderful! Just because you’re saving everything digitally, doesn’t mean you can’t make prints! If you make prints of your favorite pictures, you’re no worse off than you were before you started this digital craziness.
Feel free to add your thoughts!
Gene Black said...
Re: 3. Online backup and 7. Prints - At the risk of promoting a particular company - We use http://www.dotphoto.com personally. We’ve been storing photos there for years now without issue. There may be other sites with more bells and whistles, but among other things, you can integrate it with an existing family website, limit access to a select group of people on subsets or all of your photos, organize your photos, sell your photos if you so desire (haven’t tried this). Most importantly for us though, the print quality is good and the prices are the best I’ve found if you use their bulk packages (Order X number of prepaid prints, use them within a year from ordering on however many different orders you need).
Re: 6. Hard Disk - The whole purpose of having media is to use it. At least one of your storage forms needs to provide for easy access and indexing/sorting of the content. Hard Disk is a really nice way to go in this respect if you can afford it - and adding additional drives either for backup or in a redundant RAID array just makes it better if the costs are acceptable for your needs.
August 22, 2007 7:19 pm #
Stuart said...
Let me give a shout for Mozy - the nice thing about using their setup is that the first 2Gb is free and if you don’t like it you’ve likely had a while to work that out.
Secondly they provider an app that sits in your toolbar and monitors folders of your choice on your hard drive and backs them up when changes occur. So if you like to organise your files in one way then Mozy duplicates that in it’s backup regime.
Me, I’m just a happy user of it but I also use multiple DVD copies which are re-created every 6 to 12mths. I also backup to external hard drive and finally I utilse an ageing DAT drive as well.
BUT - none of these methods are any good if you don’t check they work from time to time.
August 27, 2007 10:41 am #
Rob said...
There seems to be a lot of these digital photo backup and printing services popping up. But where almost every one of them falls down is in not providing software that makes it easy to upload photos. Many of them do their best and provide client software you can install on your computer that makes it easy to drag and drop your photo folders and upload them all in one shot, but I’ve never found one that can beat one problem…bandwidth. Even with broadband, if you have several gigabytes worth of photos, one hiccup in the middle of the upload can cause the software to crash, forcing you to figure out what made it and what didn’t. I’m still looking for a site like dotphoto.com or winkflash that provides _transactional_ uploads. If the upload fails for any reason, it either rolls back the entire transaction or does asynchronous queuing to overcome bandwidth limitations.
Anyone seen such a solution?
August 27, 2007 7:20 pm #
Thomas said...
My Solution:
=======================================
1. Get an account w/ a hosting company like Lunarpages.com
=======================================
- $6.95
- 350 GB Storage
- 3500 GB Bandwidth
- Free Domain Name for Life!
With this much storage and bandwidth, you could set one up for extended family. Companies like Mozy only costs $4.95, but that’s p/computer. With this setup, you can use multiple computers at $6.95. Split that between 4 families and it’s $1.75 p/month, or $21 a year.
Plus you get lots of other benefits with having your own website location
- share photos with other family/friends if you want to… just send them a link
- create a family website or blog (which is easy to setup through their control panel)
- setup unlimited email address (myname@mydomain.com). No more myname12345@domain.com
- companies like Lunarpages.com do tape backups once a week.
=======================================
2. Download the free version of SyncBack Freeware
=======================================
http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html#freeware
- Very powerful file backup/sync tool
- Supports backup/sync w/ FTP
- Supports scheduling
NOTES:
Since this is a a sync tool, it will do directory/file comparisons and only backup files that have not yet been backed up, which is what Rob expressed concern about. If there’s a crash or lost internet connection during backup, it will begin where it last left off the next time you start it.
The only small downside that I’ve come across using the ftp method is it will change the “date modified” of the file. It does this so that it knows not to back it up again, unless you change the file. If you are like me and like to organize your photos by date, then you just need to be aware of this and look at another date reference. I can go into more detail if people have questions about this, but won’t for now.
Date info associated with a file:
——————————————-
Date Modified: changes
Date Created: no change
Date Picture Taken: pictures only, no change
SyncBack also supports scheduling with 2 main options.
1. manually run this sync once, but wait until 3AM when I’m not using my computer
2. run in the task tray and backup every night at 3AM (or whatever time you want).
==================================
Being the “techy” guy of the family, I’ve set this up and installed the software on a few family members computers. I’ve created personal FTP accounts through Lunarpages.com control panel. With each FTP account, the member only has access to their directory so they don’t mess other members backups. I also assign a disc quota for each ftp account, so they aren’t backing up their entire computer and then some of the server. This quota can be adjusted at any time.
A few additional notes:
=======================================
Redundancy:
=======================================
This article is good, because it refers to redundancy. I’ve already had one incident where the hard drive at the hosting company went bad. They do tape backups, but they are only a few weeks old and the problem had been going for several weeks. Fortunately, I had a local copy and was able to fix it. Now, if my HD had gone I would’ve been able to get a restored backup from them. My point being, this is an extremely good method for backing up, but don’t make it your only.
=======================================
CD/DVD Quarterly Backups:
=======================================
I have a calendar reminder once a quarter to do a CD or DVD backup. I then store those backups to another location.
September 2, 2007 10:26 am #