Online Backup Photographers

 

Since the launch of high quality DSLR cameras the life and the way a photographer works has fundamentally changed. The reason for this is a photograph is now held as data on a computer hard drive not as a tangible piece of photographic film or paper.  Now all photographers are faced with an important issue, how do they backup and protect their images.

 

If a professional or serious amateur photographer was to lose an entire collection of images then the results would be catastrophic.  All they could do would be to start all over again, so how does a photographer currently backup?  Usually onto an external hard drive or archive images to a CD or DVD.  Both Solutions are not the best option, but until recently they have only been the only realistic and affordable way to backup.

 

If a photographer copies images to an external hard drive then the protection is guaranteed against drive failure, however both drives are open to the same threats such as fire, flood, theft, accidental human error and data corruption to name a few.

 

Archiving data to a CD or DVD media is another effective method, but this backup solution is time consuming and not 100% guaranteed.  Disk media has a shelf life and there is no guessing how long it is until optical media becomes unreadable, could be 10 years, could be 10 minutes, the only thing we can guarantee is the photographs are not 100% secure and a lot of time will be spent copying data which could be better spent out in the field.

 

Photographers create and accumulate a massive amount of data, 10MB per image, once edited with Photoshop and saved as a TIFF file this could be as large as 50MB to 100MB, multiply this by 500 images and you could easily be looking at over 100GB of data.  This quantity of data is usually only held by larger companies with IT departments, large hardware infrastructure, large budgets and the human resource to manage luxuries a photographer could not afford or comprehend. 

 

If a photographer has a broadband internet connection then they can backup using an online backup solution.  This process is automatic and due to the huge reduction in storage and connectivity costs it has become affordable.  It is now possible to backup 150GB of data for less than £15.00 per month.

 

An automated backup process which will enable secure data storage of all data for up to 2048 years.  If you edit you images over a period of days, the backup software also includes "versioning" which means you can role back to a version of image from last week.  An online backup solution is totally automated, photographers can take and edit their pictures in the day and the backup software will automatically upload data at night time to offsite storage infrastructures.

 

Should photographs ever be lost from a local computer or hard drive, then it is easy to restore them with a single mouse click.