Online Photo Backup Becomes Reality
Saturday, July 19th, 2008A lot of discussion has been going on lately about backup strategies for your photos. The PhotoNetCast crew discussed this back at the end of May. The TWIP crew have been bouncing around this in recent podcasts as well. One thing that is a certainty with backup strategies: don’t store all your eggs in one basket, get a copy of your data away form your home/office. This is exactly what ever business does that depends on data and has a serious backup strategy. Luckily, there are now some solutions for photographers as well.
In general, the complexity of your backup strategy is directly related to your paranoia level. This paranoia level tends to increase as soon as you have a failure and loose some photos. The more paranoid you are, the more copies you tend to make of your photos. The problem is that the more copies you make, the more work it takes to manage those copies. When it comes to doing off site backups, the work level usually overtakes the paranoid level, which means most people don’t do it.
The most obvious way to do an off site backup is to physically move a copy of your data (i.e., a set of hard drives) to a off site location like a friend or family members house or to a safety deposit box. Again, this requires considerable work by photographer because it is all too easy to let weeks or months go by without rotating a new backup off site. Ideally, you want to be doing this as frequently as you are making substantial changes to your work.
The good news, is that automated, off site, backup services exist. These work by having a small piece of software running on your computer and monitoring a specified set of files. When those files change, the software will upload the new versions to the backup service over the internet. Obviously, the pre-requisite for using one of these services is a broadband internet connection (besides having data you want to protect). Most of these services run in the background when you’re not using the computer, compress files before transmitting them up to the cloud, and have a web based interface that check on your files and recover them if you need to.
Online backup services solve the backup problems of
- Having an off site backup and
- Having that backup accurately mirror your work, automatically.
The problem with these services has always been the expense. Many are based upon how much you store up on the cloud which increase the costs dramatically for photographers with 100’s of Gigabytes of photos.
Now, that problem has even been solved!
Recently Mozy, one of the biggest online backup providers for businesses (which also happens to be owned by EMC, one of the biggest names in storage and backups for corporations), has lunched MozyHome Online Backup service. At only $4.95 per month for unlimited storage, this is a dream come true for photographers. If you hurry and sign up for the service before the end of July with the promotion code SDCMOZY, you can save an extra $10%.
You will need to run the Mozy client on your computer (supporting both Mac and Windows) and expect to leave your computer on for a week or more (depending on how big your photo archive is) to get the first backup complete. But after that, you’re off site backup concerns will be a thing of the past.
When you compare this with other photography specific off site backup services the price advantage quickly becomes apparent. With most photographers having 100’s of Gigabytes to Terabytes of photos, the economics of using other services that don’t offer unlimited storage make them economically unattractive. And the economics of not having an automated off site backup strategy is no longer an excuse.
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