Tips on Digital Photo Backup

Most professional photographers are artsy geeks – photography is a fairly technical practice and many of you may already have a digital photo backup strategy even more thorough and complex than mine. But in case you are not a techie geek – maybe you are just the person in your family who takes the most photos and is thus are more or less “in charge” of recording your family history – here are some important backup considerations for you.

With my digital photos now taking so much more space per image on my Canon EOS 7D compared to my old Canon EOS 20D, I very quickly eat up hard drive space.  A couple of years ago I stopped being able to store all my images on my MacBook Pro due to hard drive space limits. I went from keeping all images, to keeping the past 2 years on my hard drive, then only the current  year … and now I can’t even store a full year of photos on it. Aside from getting a desktop like a MacPro, I will never again be able to store all my photos on my main computer.

So, it presents a problem, in that Time Machine can no longer automatically back up my photos as they are not on my main computer. Hmm. What should I do for backups ? My initial reaction was to copy my photos manually to another drive. Two copies. One was my Mac which TimeMachine backed up, and the other was a plug-in desktop external drive. I did that for a few years. I guess I was lucky …

Three is better than Two

Always keep at least 3 backups of each image on 3 physically different drives (not partitions of the same drive), ideally with one of those backups in another physical location to the main one you use daily.

I heard from Corey Rich at photography workshop that 3 was the least number of backups to keep, based on his experience with near-misses in the past. He should know, he has shot for major magazines and made his life off of photography since he got out of school. Lucky and talented bastard. 😉

I am glad I listened, because this year I had 2 backup drives go out within a week of each other, leaving me with a single copy of all my digital photos for the past 11 years ! I could have lost them all if I had only copied the images to disk twice. Whew. Drives just do not last very long these days.

DVD

Some photographers additionally burn their files to DVD after every shoot. This is OK assuming you might only need to get those photos out again in the next year or so for your client for reprints – but DVD media, all by itself, will degrade over time. It just does. There are a lot of articles on this out there about disappearing movies etc., trust me. So absolutely 100% do not use DVD as your only photo backup type. Use hard drives as well.

In the old days of negatives, you had one original and if you had some natural disaster that affected your storage area, your entire career’s worth of negatives could be lost in the process, leaving you only with any prints you had made that were stored elsewhere. But natural disasters were rare, and you could buy water proof storage units (fires were more problematic however).

Now with digital recording media you do have a chance, if properly planned, to escape that fate entirely. But if you do not plan it properly (keep multiple copies of your backups), a hard disk error can wipe out your entire photo collection in one fell swoop.  And it is practically guaranteed that every computer hard drivewill fail within 3-5 years of heavy use – so one could say that photographers are definitely under more threat of their photos disappearing now than in the “old days” since computer hard drives fail at a much higher rate than a natural disaster would occur.

RAW vs JPG

I also have switched from shooting .jpg to always shooting the much larger and richer RAW files. When I stopped shooting film professionally in 2001 and moved to France, I spent a few years between 2001-2005 shooting rather crummy (now that you look back on it) digital with a Nikon 775 because it was easy to use for casual shots and even had a screw on wide angle lens, and saving film for “special occasions” as film was very expensive to process in Europe. The file sizes were minuscule even on “large” – just around 1MB and RAW was not an option.

When I made the “final switch” in 2005 from film to digital upon purchase of my  Canon EOS 20D, replacing my beloved old EOS 1N film camera (I had 2 but had sold one already), I “wanted” to shoot this thing called RAW and knew from reading articles it was better in detail, but in practice I found shooting RAW was difficult because you had to Photoshop each image separately and that was slow. Workflow was difficult. This was back when the RAW format was relatively new and most computer programs did not even support showing it in a preview window.

So if I was shooting something I knew was really interesting I shot both RAW and .jpg, but as I was not shooting professionally anymore at that stage I often shot just .jpg to preserve card space on longer trips. The file sizes then were around 2MB for a .jpg and 8MB for a RAW CR2 file. Now, on my 7D the RAW CR2 files are close to 25MB a piece … and if I ever get my dream Canon EOS 1DX … watch out. RAW files do eat up disk space, but they are far superior to .jpg files.

RAW is of course better – you can compare the quality difference to having the original negative in film days, rather than keeping the 60-minute photo store’s print as your only copy of your image. It holds vastly more data about the image than the in-camera processed JPG file does. I now shoot only RAW … but this is because of improvements in the digital darkroom realm.

Workflow Management in Digital

I changed my mind entirely about always shooting RAW when I researched photo management software and bought Adobe Lightroom, where the RAW workflow is totally automated. Another good good product for Mac is Apple’s Aperture and it has the same features regarding RAW processing. You can read many comparisons of the two and make your decision. Be sure to compare the most recent versions of the software, as that is what you would purchase. Both offer free trial versions for about 30 days so you can use them for a bit and make your final decision. It is money well spent – I don’t know why I waited so long to try it – I had no idea how much easier these workflow tools could make my ability to produce decent images for sharing and selling.

The RAW files will be exported in whatever format you need after you do your adjustments in Lightroom, with all your changes automatically applied, no matter what size or format you are exporting. It integrates with Photoshop and other editing software if you need to do major work on the image that Lightroom does not do (retouching sections of the shot to get rid of logos for stock use etc.) and you can make a separate copy for this export so that your original is always there, just like your negatives in the old days. Again, a dream come true. If I am shooting a fast-moving sports event I can use up 3-4 16GB media cards in a day ! Now I never shoot .jpg – I just buy more CF cards for long shoots, and always always shoot RAW.

Oh … I do not recommend iPhoto as a photo management tool if you take a lot of pictures. Or care about your photos. I started to use it and thought it was really not so bad. I often still had to use Photoshop for my important images, but for those casual shots between friends it seemed just fine. Then as my hard drive got full and I wanted to move images to external drives, I had issues in iPhoto.

iPhoto could not be reset to find the photos under the new drive automatically – I had to click on every single photo individually and answer thousands of  “helpful” messages that iPhoto sent out telling me my original photos were missing whenever I would try to use them after moving the underlying folder. In Lightroom or Aperture you can redirect the software to the new folder very easily by clicking on the parent folder and pointing it to the new drive. Not so in iPhoto – each photo must be re-directed one by one. When you have thousands of images to re-direct, this is just unbearable.

Secondly, in iPhoto you stand a very good chance of accidentally losing the original photo and being stuck with only a thumbnail if you do not realise what all the import options really do in iPhoto (the descriptions of what they do are not well-worded).  Luckily this never happened to me … it *almost* happened but I still had the photos on my CF card – and I consider myself a seasoned intelligent end-user of computer software. If you decide anyhow to use iPhoto because it is included on your Mac and integrates with other iLife programs, be sure to always download your photos into a separate folder using your camera’s import software and then import them into iPhoto in a separate step, without deleting the original.

WD MyPassport Essential issues with MacBook Pro

Just a quick note in case this helps anyone else with the same problem with WD External drives for Mac – specifically  MyPassport Essential – working properly on their Mac.

In the past 2 years I have had to return 4 different Western Digital (WD) MyPassport Essential series drives to the manufacturer. I use these to hold redundant back ups of my photographs. The drives were a dream made reality when they came on the market – totally portable, powered off of the connection cable to your Mac and they hold a whopping 1TB of data. How great is that ?

I immediately bought a few of the drives – they were priced right as well. The first one had to be returned 3 times to get one that worked (early versions of these drives had cable issues where the cable was not robust enough to support powering the drive). Then after that, they stabilized and I started to trust them as true backup copies of my data, not just as portable “part time” drives when traveling.

Usually when I am in Adobe Lightroom importing new shots, I automatically copy the images first to a more sturdy desk top non-portable hard drive, and make sure I end up with 2 additional copies to the WD smaller portable drives. These let me work on my images when traveling and make it easier to carry things around and work wherever I am if I have the chance and also provide redundant backups of my data.

But while I have been impressed with the size and portability of the drives, I have had several of them give major problems on the MacBook Pro. I had the same problems on my OS Leopard and Snow Leopard. I even had the Geniuses at Apple Geneva check my Mac in case that was the issue, but the drives did the same thing on their machines too. They do disappearing acts. Often in the middle of copying a large set of data they simply stop working. I get a message saying I cannot power off the drive because it is in use or to be exact the phrase the Mac tosses up is :

“WD My Passport 0740 Media is in use and cannot be powered off.”

– of course, I am not trying to power off my WD External drive for my Mac … something in the operating system is dropping it for some reason, right in the middle of copying data to it. Or other times, they do not appear when plugged in and must be unplugged and plugged in again a few times. Or I must even re-boot the Mac to get it to recognise the drive. Not so much fun if you had work to do with that drive and are hours away from your other data copies.

I had searched high and low on internet forums for an answer, and finally yesterday I found and did something on MacRumors forum that (fingers crossed, knock wood) seems to have worked to fix the random power down issue.

I had  just received a brand new drive in the mail and returned the old drive (which I thought was failing) on an RMA. By the way, WD support is actually quite good and prompt for drive replacement – the website is easy to use and the support team answers your mails. (Good customer support – what a concept !) They just don’t seem to know the answer to this problem, except to diagnose it as a failing drive. As I was trying to copy my data onto the new drive, it repeatedly disappeared, often with that message and with another one saying the file could not be copied and an error code. I was told to go ahead and use the RMA process to replace the drive. Oh … I could read the drive from a friend’s PC … another hint.

Following the MacRumors forum suggestion I found via Googling the exact error message, I uninstalled the WD SmartWare from Applications by using the WD “uninstall” icon on my Mac and …. violà ! I have been copying data onto the new drive for 2 days now without issue.

Prior to that it would not go more than a minute or two – sometimes only 30 seconds – before shutting itself down. What stupid software you have created Western Digital … and in case anyone from your company is listening, you are probably wasting a lot of money on replacing people’s drives simply because of that poor drive management software.

If you are on a Mac and want to use a WD MyPassport as a Time Machine, uninstall the WD SmartWare. There is no need, it is redundant and provides you no benefit and it seems to interfere with drive power.

If you are someone like me using the drives for copies of digital photo backups, again there is also no real need for that WD software – I have Lightroom automatically create the 2nd copy and then manually copy a 3rd version. If I wanted to, I could (and some day will still do) set up an automated Mac job with Automator or another tool to keep them in sync automatically. In any case, I had installed SmartWare thinking it would make the drive run better as it also has some drive monitoring technology (temperature monitoring or something like that) … But in reality, it seems to mess things up more than it helps.