Image Backup for a Long Journey

       

Out of the Fog, Venice

Tiber Steps, Rome

I have been running about trying to catch whatever is left of this year’s disappointing fall foliage.  I’ve found glimpses of nice late color, but I missed the first half of the season.  I have no right to complain since, while everyone was wondering whether the color would ever come, I was enjoying a perfect three weeks exploring the beauty and history of Italy.  As I struggle to decide whether I should spend my time editing images from our trip or from my increasing pile of foliage pictures, I thought I would take a break and share a little about the challenges of backing up my precious images while on a long trip away from the comforts of my trusty home desktop.

One Dome, St. Peter's, Vatican City

On trips such as our Italian tour, it is my pictures that are my primary souvenirs of the experience.  I also routinely try to collect one coffee mug, a baseball cap.  From Italy, I brought home the mug, but I couldn’t find an appropriate cap.  I observed that Italians don’t generally wear hats, and definitely not baseball caps.  This put extra importance on the pictures.  I’d like to share some of the steps I take to protect (i.e. Back-up) my images, and some of the lessons I continue to learn. It all starts with the camera(s)

Saint Peter's Vatican City

Backup the Camera

Susan on the Wall, San Gimignano

You will have no pictures to backup if you can’t capture the images in the first place. One of my firsts step in preparing for a photography trip (ok, every trip is a photography trip), is to decide how I will back-up my cameras.  I don’t want to be left shooting the coliseum with my iPhone, although many do.  For this trip I backed up my Canon 5D Mark IV with my Mark II body.  This seemed to be a good plan. If my Mark IV suffered a sudden mechanical failure.  All my lenses would work just fine and I would still be shooting full frame.  Time for my first lesson.

Grayson and Cuyler, Cupano Vineyard, Tuscany

Lesson One : Theives don’t just steal camera bodies.

Sunset Together, Tuscany

At some point while walking the dark narrow streets of Florence, it occurred to that my camera might get stolen, and I thought it unlikely that the thief would remove my workhorse 24-105 lens and place it next to my unconscious, bleeding body.  On this trip, I brought my 16-35mm and my old 70-300mm, but neither would be best for the majority of the pictures that I captured.  Throughout Italy, 91% of my images were taken with my 24-105mm.  In case of theft. I would still have my Mark II, and although it is always an interesting challenge to shoot with limited lenses, for many situations, the camera would still be severely crippled. I wouldn’t be totally lost since my second backup was my little Canon G11.  I usually bring the G11 to use in situations where the my massive DSLR might be too clumsy or conspicuous to carry.  The image quality doesn’t come close to my Mark IV or II, but in a pinch, it would serve.

New Light, Tuscan Villa

Asinelli Tower, Bologna

My lesson from this revelation was to plan to equip my backup camera with a capable backup lens.  As it turns out, I am lucky to have a second 24-105 lens.  It’s the one that I drop into a stream a few years back.  Canon did not judge the lens to be repairable, but over time the water has dried leaving only a few imperceptible stains, and happily no mold.  It works well and from now on I will attach it to my 5D Mark II before I throw it into my bag.  Obviously, not everyone will have the good fortune of dropping their camera into a brook, but there are plenty of used and off-brand lenses out there that might be worth considering.  Alternatively, small carry around camera is a good solution.

Street Produce, Bologna

Oh,  and I keep the Mark II in my suitcase away from my other gear.

Am I paranoid?  ABSOLUTELY, but the point is that you should anticipate the possible disasters and plan for their inevitable occurrence.   Of course, if you are ok with recording your once-in-a-lifetime journey with pictures on your smart phone, then you have nothing to worry about.

Image Backup,

No Image Exists Unless It is in Three Places

The old “Three Place” rule is especially important on “Once in a Lifetime Trips”.  For Italy, I backed up twice to memory cards, and then both to a laptop and an external hard drive.  It just occurred to me that five thousand images in four places means I actually came home with twenty thousand images!  It’s all good.

 Memory Cards

Lesson Two : Bring Enough

Lake Como Chop, Como

Memory cards have become increasingly cheap and reliable.  I’m happy that Canon has finally placed two card slots in their newer 5D models and on the trip I saved each image simultaneously to two cards in the camera.  I had enough CF and SD cards to continue this redundancy until I finally had to go to a single card for the last couple of days. The lesson here is that, although memory cards have become extremely reliable, they still could fail, and, if possible, dual recording is a great safety measure.  My personal lesson, is to bring enough cards to get through the entire trip.

Lake Como, Brunate

Laptop

Lesson 3 : Organize your trip images in a separate Lightroom Catalog

Santa Maria della Salute, Venice

I love to review my pictures as I go along on the trip, but the main reason to lug a laptop is to manage the backup to the computer and an external hard drive.  Now that I am a devote Lightroom user, I have learned that my task of moving my images to my desktop at home is made much easier by creating a separate Lightroom Catalog on the trip to organize the images.  At home all I need to do is merge the trip catalog with my main catalog and then, from within Lightroom, move the images over to my desktop storage.  Of course, if you are not using Lightroom, you should structure your backup to work best with you own image management program.

Grand canal Sunset, Venice

External Hard Drive

Lesson 4: Store the Catalog and the Images on the External Hard Drive

Floor Mosaic, Vatican Museum

Over several trips, my daily image upload routine has been to store my special catalog and images to my laptop, but I forgot the rule that Lightroom images should be stored on an external drive and not be allowed to clog the computer.  Since when I get home, I will be moving everything to my desktop, that process is made much easier by keeping both the catalog and the image files on the external drive. On the trip they can still be accessed on the laptop and I will use the laptop as my backup drive while uploading to Lightroom

Getting Home

Towers of San Gimignano, Tuscany

My fiendish plan is complete.  Cards, cards, laptop and external drive, everything is in, not three, but FOUR places.  I can sleep, but there is one final challenge.  All those pixels need to make it home.

While on a trip I usual split my treasures to avoid the chance that a single disaster; lost luggage, stolen camera bag or pick-pocket, could take everything. I typically store my external drive sandwiched among the soft clothing in my suitcase.  The memory cards are in my camera bag and Susan guards the laptop in her backpack.  

One of Many Porticos of Bologna

The flight back is a different matter.  My rule is that I never check my camera gear and I keep at least a couple of copies of my images with me, at all times.  I still carefully pad the hard drive in my luggage, but the laptop and the memory cards stay at my side.  

By now you are certain that I am certifiably paranoid, but think about what you bring back from that once in a lifetime trip.  Besides wonderful memories and that pesky yeast infection, the most important tangible souvenirs will likely be your photographs.  Bring them home safely so that your only physical remembrance won’t be that lonely little coffee mug.

Jeffrey Newcomer
www.partridgebrookreflections.com

Dumb Luck and Backing Up Your Images

Do as I Say, Not as I Did

Golden Corridor, Almost Lost

You have heard it many times before, but it can never be repeated too often. Back up your work! This week I will describe how I have attempted to back up my photographs, not as an example of best practice, but as a cautionary tale about what can go disastrously wrong and how dumb luck saved me. 

Several weeks ago I received an order for a copy of one of my favorite recent images. I had printed this image before so I knew that the file was in my edited images directory, ready to print. I found the file, but when I attempted to open it in Photoshop the computer whired for long minutes and then froze. My heart sank as the same thing happen on every file I tried to open from this directory. Nothing worked, and I realized that I had lost thousands of hours of work on more than 4000 of my best images, collected over more than a decade.




During over ten years of more serious New England photography

CD Backup

and especially since digital imagery has come to dominate my work, I have taken various approaches to backing up my photographs. In the early years, the image files were so small that I could fit several months on a single CD. From 2001 until early 2008, I felt secure keeping one set of CDs at home and a second copy in my Keene, New Hampshire office, but as my cameras went from 2 to 6 to 12 and then 21 mega pixels, this solution was no longer practical. Today I would require several DVDs to backup each month's work. This October I captured over 1500 autumn images totaling 32 Meg's, which would fill 7 DVDs. With my ballooning backup requirements I have become shamefully sloppy in my "strategy", with files scattered across several hard drives both on internal and external drives. My first PC had a single 120meg hard drive which at the time seemed liked “more storage than I would ever need”. Now I have a total of 32 Terabytes of capacity spread over 15 drives, and yet it seems I am constantly running out of space. I still organize the images by month, but I had some directories backed up on multiple drives and others hanging precariously on just one fallible drive. I was having nightmares about the fact that EVERY physical drive fails eventually. I knew it was an inevitability NOT a possibility. I had to do something and I knew that the best protection was in redundancy.

Tiers of Redundancy

Save the Drobos First
The first measure was to improve the reliability of the storage.

Desktop Backup

Redundancy is the key. One part of my approach was to move my critical data to Drobos. Drobos are redundant, pooled backup drives which contain multiple drives, making it possible for a drive to fail without losing the data. When failures occur, the system automatically compensates and distributes the data across the remaining drives. I now have two Drobo units each with four hard drives adding up to a total of 20 terabytes, but no matter how reliable, any drive or array of drives can fail. The second tier of protective redundancy is to backup to more than one physical drive.

My current backup workflow starts with translating my camera's Canon proprietary raw files to Adobe’s open source DNG format. I like DNG format since it is nonproprietary and because the image meta data is stored within the image file and not on those annoying sidecar XMP files. I use the DNGs for editing and archiving, but before I do anything else, I save the original Canon raw files to a separate drive as a backup. As I work on my edited files, they are stored in a separate drive as well. This leaves me with two copies of all of my raw images, but only one full copy of my finished, edited images. I figured that if I lost my edited images, I would still have the original raw files. I didn’t allow myself to think about the potential loss of my massive investment in photo editing. Stupid! And deep down I knew it.

I also knew that a fire, flood or tornado could still wipe out all of

partridgebrookreflections.com : archive

my images. In case of fire my evacuation priorities are: 1) Drobos, 2) Dog, 3) Wife, but it is still dangerous to have all my images in one location. Recently I have been investigating approaches to “off-site” backup as my third tier of protection. There are a number
of good “cloud based” services (eg Back Blaze, Carbonite and Crash Plan) available to archive my files, but given my massive amount of data, it would take months to upload all my images over the Internet. I thought that If I could backup my current archive, I could then consider using a automatic cloud solution for my future work. In the meantime, I have started backing up my new, full resolution, edited images to my new Zenfolio Website.








I eventually decided to start by creating my own off-site backup

Bob's Closet Archive

and here is where my dumb luck kicked in. After stalling for months, I copied my RAW directories and my precious collection of edited images to a 3TB external drive. My plan was to store this archive drive in my neighbor’s house, protecting me from fire but not necessarily from tornado or nuclear blast. It took more than a day to copy over the files. As planned I squirreled away the drive in Bob’s closet. I slept better that night, but I had no idea how soon that backup would become critical. 


Disaster
Just two weeks later, as if it knew it was safe to retire, my edited
image drive failed. Suddenly I could see the images in the directory but, despite all efforts at repair, I couldn’t get them to open. If I had not created that backup drive I would have lost years of work on all my most popular images. I still had all the original RAW files, but

4000 files, 21 hours, priceless

the number of hours of lost image editing would have been incalculable and devastating. After all my sloppy delay in creating a backup, I definitely did not deserved to be saved, but saved I was. I retrieved my drive and reloaded the 1.8 TB of irreplaceable images. All I can say is that there are a lot worse ways to learn a few lessons. The lesions are nothing that we don’t already know but they are worth repeating, endlessly.

Lesions

• Every machine fails eventually, and that includes the best hard drive or array of drives.
• Images stored only on one drive will eventually be lost.
• Memory is cheap and getting cheaper all the time.
  
• An image does not exist until it is in two places, preferably three, with one off site.
• An automatic solution is better than one that requires regular thought.
  
• Regular thought NEVER happens.

My backup strategy is not perfect. I'm still working on the cloud solution, and the automation of my backup process, but the important thing is to have a plan and follow through. Many of you must have better solutions, but for those who haven't established a redundant backup plan, do it today.  It takes time, but no amount of time or effort can retrieve your precious lost images. You can't always rely on dumb luck. 

Oh, and the correct order is 1) Drobos, 2) Dog, 3) iPad and then 4) Wife.