I don’t know how many hard drives you have but as a photographer and filmmaker I have over a dozen hard drives, scattered across three computers.
It used to be enough just to pair up some hard drives and move a few files around.
No more. Each computer needs its own backup drive/system.
I’ve just been through cleaning up duplicate backups and freeing up about five drives.
While doing so, I had to come up with some principles of backup, which I will call the backup manifesto. Here they are:
- more backup is better
- all drives to be named and labeled at all times (how many Seagate 200 GB drives – first near silent hard drives available – can one photographer have? about half a dozen)
- dispose of dead drives immediately (you have to identify them)
working drives go into USB cases of their own- when in doubt, don’t erase but retire.
- you need backup of your backup. Always pair drives.
- less working drives is easier to manage i.e. 2×1000 GB is better than 10×200 GB
- back up 5×200 GB to 1×1000 GB. This liberates 5×200 GB (second half of the pairs) and leaves you with a single working drive with access to all your archived material.
- bare SATA drives with a SATA external plug is space/power supply efficient.
- drives are cheap – even good ones. Buy top of the line well-tested drives in the largest size readily available (usually one increment down from the current maximum). Find the extra $50. Your time and nerves are worth the expense.
- get a good disk cataloging program. I use CDfinder. You don’t want to have to handplug six ATA drives every time you need to find a single old file.
- if you are serious about using your disks efficiently, get a good disk space calculator (I use Baseline) which will also tell you about duplicate files. Using Baseline, I was able to clean out 30 GB of duplicate files on my Macbook boot drive in half an hour. It would have taken days to do this work by hand with just the finder.
- keep your boot drives only 70% full (maximum!). The last 30% of your hard drive is the slowest part. You don’t want to be booting from the slowest part – your new $2000 laptop will be running at about 60% efficiency. (Different rules apply to RAID arrays but even there you’d want to keep 10 or 15% clean to make sure you don’t crash it by filling all the free space.)
- upgrade your backups to new media when you can put 4 or 5 of them on the new large standard.
- firewire 400 is more expensive and somewhat unreliable. firewire 800 is still more expensive and very unreliable. Use firewire sparingly, only for fast media drives.
- if you insist on snapshots of old boot drives, just make them disk images on the big drives. You don’t really need those snapshots. Trust me – you won’t be going back to Windows 98 or OS X 10.1.5 or 10.2.3 (you might just go back to OS 8/9 for a legacy program or two so there are exceptions). Personally I haven’t. Mac OS X is getting a lot better and so are some of the new programmers. User interface is enough better that using vintage software is really a chore. Running any kind of virtualisation puts a big burden on your computer’s resources. The less of it you can do the better (I don’t even run Rosetta 99% of the time, let alone Classic).
When you are done, you should end up with two workhorse 750/1000 GB hard drives with a bunch of retired backups and a handful of free 160 GB to 300 GB hard drives available for various purposes (scratch drives/backup drives for friends).
You should almost never have to go to the retired backups to pull a file. Put them somewhere safe with a stable temperature. If they have sensitive information on them (no reason they need to – your sensitive information can be kept on one live drive and its two current backups), buy yourself an inexpensive safe and keep the retired drives there.
The retired drives won’t be used except in emergency so they should have a lifespan of another ten years. If you do have to pull a retired drive out due to a workhorse drive going down, you should duplicate it out to new media immediately.
Update – 18 January 2009: I’ve added an article with specific OS X back up software recommendations including a Bouncer Backup stress test on MimMac.
Alec Kinnear
Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.
Hi Alec,
Usefull thoughts.
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.
1 dedicated drive for weekly backups. 1 dedicated drive for monthly backups.
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.
Hello Anselm,
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).
Hello – I am a complete beginner when it comes to backup and archiving. I have just bought my first external hard drive. I’m about to attack my nearly full PC and get all my art work (I’m an artist) and photos onto my new drive. Are any of you impressive gurus around to advise a novice? Thanks, and happy Christmas, Alexandra
Hello 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!
Hi Alec,
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