Thank you very much for the advice.

I am so small in all this it’s untrue. I have a new “My Passport Essential” hard drive that I’m about to transfer all my photos to. Is it possible to do selective back up? I don’t want to copy my entire computer because it’s full of clutter – that’s one of the reasons for doing the photo back up -so I can then ‘clean’ my laptop and hopefully get it to run better.

Are you in the States? I’m in England.

Alexandra

There are two potential systems.

You can either just occasionally update the old work on the backup drive by copying over all the files, or you can run a system of incremental backup (which is most easily done by Time Machine under Mac OS X.

For just copying all the files over for backup, you don’t need any software. To run incremental or versioned backup, you will need some software. I run Mac OS X and not Windows so I’m not sure which are the best programs for a PC. The Mac program which I use most often is SuperDuper!

You are absolutely right about how to handle your key boot drive with your essential info. The Backup Manifesto is more about how to handle media drives which accumulate and accumulate.

With media, you should keep copies of the original media around but they are not likely to be in regular use. That media which is in regular use would be in the regular cycle.

But you do want one copy handy which can be plugged in to pull photo/video/project archives when you need it – and you need one other copy stored off site (the offsite copy of the archives won’t be updated anymore nor does it need to be as these are media repositories – substantially new versions of the media would go into the regular update cycle.

In terms of encrypting drives, I’ve thought of and even done it for short periods. With encryption in place, 90% of disk utilities become useless. My experience with encryption is that it is more likely to prevent the owner from obtaining access to his or her own data than prevent ill

I am very big on physically limiting access to hardware (don’t leave your notebook hanging around).

If you have a spouse/partner who is into espionage, you have a problem when your data is unencrypted. But if you have a spouse/partner who into espionage you still have a problem (albeit it mitigated) even if your data is encrypted.

But Anselm is right – the offsite copy is very important. Anything absolutely essential (photo collection) should exist in at least three versions (onsite x 2 and offsite x 1).

Usefull thoughts.

1.
However I would always want my most important data stored on at least one harddrive that has never been in permanent use.
If there are *additional* copies on old drive, great.

2.
1 dedicated drive for weekly backups.
1 dedicated drive for monthly backups.

3.
It also a good idea to have one copy of indispensable data on a drive that you can give a family member or a close friend to keep at their home.
You can encrypt it with TrueCrypt for example if you want to keep your privacy.
This way you will still have a copy of your most important data if your house burns down.
You need to keep that drive updated though.
One strategy:
If you have or plan to use a dedicated drive for monthly backups, then you may instead use 2:
Do a backup on both.
Then give one of these drives to the person you want to keep it.
After 1-3 months you can swap your updated drive against the other one and continue monthly backups on that.
In this case your backup drive kept by the trusted person would be a bit older but still usefull if you take care of it once in a while.