Backing up your digital photographs
Ever heard your hard drive making strange clacking noises? Computer acting a bit odd lately? If you have never experienced these problems, don't worry, it is just a matter of time. Hard drive death is a matter of 'when' and not of 'if'. As we know, the majority of photographers now are digital shooters, and all those hundreds of digital pictures eventually get stashed in one place: the hard drive. Woe unto you if you don't back up weekly. In fact, it is recommended that digital shooters have THREE hard drives. The first is your normal computer boot drive. The second is a FireWire or USB external drive that is an exact copy (clone) of your regular drive. You should back it up every week or so. The third drive is another FireWire or USB drive used to keep your precious images and files on. This drive is kept in a location away from your home or office. So, in the event of a 30 metre rock from outer space depositing itself on your house, for instance, your files will be safe elsewhere. Actually, it may be better to store your images on external hard drives period, and not on your main computer hard drive. Digital pictures add up so fast that they can rapidly eat space on your main drive. I now store image files exclusively on external drives. Uh huh, I know what you're thinking, but whoever said that digital photography is cheap LIED.
One of my scanned large format images takes up about 300 - 800MB alone. I have thus started burning them onto DVDs which hold about 4GB as opposed to CDs which can only hold about 600MB of data. Many authorities suggest that you not only transfer your digital photographs from hard drive to CD for long-term storage but that you burn 2 identical CDs for each backup. This strategy is necessary after it was discovered that CDs can degrade so that your data can be unrecoverable as little as two years after you burned the CD! Admittedly, this occurrence happens to about 1 in every 50 CDs you burn, so you may take your chances. Even worse, nobody even knows which manufacturer offers CDs with better longevity profiles; so it's a toss-up. I only burn 1 CD. If the CD goes bad, I don't care, because I still have my original slides and negatives. If you are a digital shooter, however, you are doomed. I wrote this paragraph a couple years ago, and, frankly, I don't burn DVDs or CDs anymore. All my pictures are catalogued and stored on external hard drives for immediate access.
Recommended backup software includes Norton Ghost for PCs and SuperDuper or SilverKeeper for the Mac. There are other titles that range in their ease of use and sophistication. Mac owners have built-in software that can automatically detect impending hard drive failure before it's too late. It is advisable to download the free SMARTreporter software for Mac OS X. PC users: tough luck.
If you are truly superhuman, multiple 250GB or larger hard drives can be daisy-chained and set up for a RAID configuration. These drives are multiply redundant and are always powered. If a drive goes down, one just needs to swap it out. Large stock companies and some (RICH) amateurs use this arrangement for instant access to all their thousands of images. No digging up CDs in a drawer for them! There are, however, disadvantages to RAID configurations, so do your homework before deciding on embarking on one. As I don't need my files to be instantly accessible over a network, I have not bothered with RAID.
When I need to look for one of my slides, it is simply a matter of plopping them down on a lightbox and flipping through until I find the one I'm looking for. If you're shooting digital and burning CDs how do you find a particular image buried on one of your dozens of CDs? A good idea is to use Photoshop's 'Contact Sheet' feature. Simply select all the files to be burned in Photoshop and make a contact sheet. Print the contact sheet/s and attach it to the CD. Looking for an image is now simply a matter of looking through the contact sheet thumbnails. Again, this paragraph was written a couple years ago. The procedure described drove me nuts. Nowadays I use Apple's Aperture to keep track of everything. That will be the subject of another article.