Backing It Up - Digital Photos
When wildfires raged through San Diego county last fall, my wife and I found ourselves pondering the question of what to take with us if we were forced to evacuate our home. Luckily, we weren’t ever in any danger but it did force us to consider what things were important to take with us in the event that we did have to leave. Beyond the obvious family heirlooms and important documents, I found myself wondering how to best save the various artifacts of my digital life.
In the past year, I’ve been trying to put together a good backup strategy for the various computers in our household. Through the use of mirrored disks, external hard drives and DVD back-ups, I’m reasonably confident that I won’t be losing any data to system or disk failures. However, I realized that recovering from a failed hard disk and recovering from a burnt-down house are not exactly the same thing. If I have to leave my house with 5 minutes notice, do I want to be running around collecting hard drives and DVDs? Probably not — we’d be lucky to get our kids and dog loaded in the car in that amount of time.
Recognizing a pretty serious deficiency in our backup strategy, I spent some time investigating the various web-based backup options available. This sort of thing probably wouldn’t have been affordable to the average home user a few years back, but these days most people have pretty big internet pipes running to their house (I’m jealous of you Verizon FIOS users out there with your 5+ Mbps upload speeds) and the big web companies seem to have more storage space available than they know what to do with. With bandwidth to spare and the low cost of hosted storage there’s little reason not to be doing some sort of offsite backup.
This will be the first in a series of posts where I discuss the various back-up options that I’ve explored. I can’t promise that I’ve conducted an exhaustive investigation of all the services out there, but I have found a number of solutions that I’m very happy with.
Later in this series I’ll discuss some of the general-purpose backup solutions available, but first I want to cover some online applications that address very specific backup needs.
Photos
There is nothing on my computer that would be more devastating to lose than my photo collection. With two young kids in the house we take a lot of pictures, so my photo collection probably consumes more space than anything else on my system. With the ability to view photos on my computer, phone, iPod and game console there is almost no reason for me to print photos anymore (sorry HP, I’m probably not running through that ink and photo paper quite as fast as you might like). This means that the digital versions of my pictures are often the only versions.
So when it comes to my back-up strategy, the top priority is always to make sure that my photos are secure. For the most part, photos can be treated just like any other file that you want to back up. However, in addition to storing my photos, I’d also like to be able to share them with friends/family. All of the general-purpose backup services that I’ll discuss later will allow you to upload your photos, but they’re not stored in a way that you (or anyone else) can browse online.
I’ve played with a lot of the photo sharing services out there but ultimately settled on Flickr as the one that I’m using. You can set-up an account for free on Flickr, though it does come with some limitations (100MB of photo uploads per month). That might work well for some people, but I upgraded to the Pro account ($24.95 per year) which gives me unlimited uploads and unlimited storage space.
I’ve gotten into the habit of simply uploading all my photos to Flickr (at least the ones that are worth saving) and those become the “master” copies. The grandparents know that they can always go to my Flickr page to find the latest pics of the grandkids and I never have to worry about backing-up my pictures. I do still have many of my pics on my local hard drive, but I’m not going to sweat-it if that disk ever crashes.
It seems that every major photo editor has an “Upload to Flickr” option now so the process of getting your pics uploaded could hardly be an easier. I’m using the Flickr Uploadr on both Windows and Mac and it makes it pretty simple to quickly organize, title, tag and upload images.
One of the great things about Flickr is that they don’t dumb-down your pics at all. If you have a nice camera that’s generating multi-megabyte JPGs, Flickr will happily store your huge photo files and let you retrieve the full-res images with all the associated metadata intact at any time (Note to the serious photographers out there, Flickr obviously isn’t an option for archiving RAW files — stay tuned for my post on general-purpose backup solutions).
I’ve looked at other photo services like Shutterfly and Snapfish (apologies again to my employer) but they come up short on one key feature: once you upload your pictures, you can never get at the original file again. They may have the original, full-resolution image stored somewhere, but you don’t have access to it. This is unacceptable if you’re thinking of using these services for archival purposes. Of course, the whole idea behind sites like Shutterlfy and Snapfish is to get people to print their photos so it isn’t surprising that they don’t meet my needs when it comes to backing-up and sharing pictures. However, I know plenty of people that try and use these services for this purpose and it drives me crazy.
I should point out that Google’s Picasa Web Albums offers many of the same benefits as Flickr, but it’s more expensive for comparable amounts of storage and I find the interface to be a lot clunkier than Flickr. Compare them for yourself though — I know plenty of people that prefer Picasa.
Whichever solution you settle on, make sure you back up those pictures!
2 Responses to “Backing It Up - Digital Photos”
Brian-you are hard boiled. I can only understand about 1 out of every 5 words on this site. I am beyond imprssed and, I have to admit, a bit annoyed at people like you that make me feel dumb.
I have no idea how I remembered you’d blogged about this (considering I find your techie blog to be so very boring, ha ha ha), but this post today came in most useful when J called and suggested we look into Goggle Picasa for our needs photo back up needs.
Thanks for being such a big time nerd! (You nerds are so useful that I went out and got one of my own.)
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