Need a plan to deal with digital photo storage and backup

October 14, 2016 10:19 AM

Since getting a new camera and renewing my love of photography, the quantity of images I've generated has quickly outstripped the size of my hard drive. It's only going to get worse, so I'm looking for a plan for both storing and backing up these files, especially if you've solved this same problem with a high volume of data.

Right now, I have a 256GB hard drive on my Surface Pro 4 (which only has a single USB port) and a 1.5TB external hard drive that I'm keeping the photographs on. I also have about 1TB of space on OneDrive.

For storage, I've considered either keeping up with external hard drives, or just buying a NAS.

Backup is where it becomes tricky. I've used Crashplan in the past, but I'm not excited about the time it'll take to back up from an external drive (especially the initial backup), and they also got rid of their ability to order a drive with your data should it need restoring. Having a computer with a single USB port hampers my ability to dupe drives for backup (I'd then keep one offsite), but that could be solved with a dock. Not sure what I'd do with a NAS.

Suggestions? Best practices? Anything I'm totally missing?

posted by Special Agent Dale Cooper to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

how mission critical is the backup ? (will you be poor and out on the street if you lose everything, incredibly sad at the loss, or mildly inconvenienced) How readily accessible do you need the data ? Do you need it accessible from anywhere or just "home" ? What's high volume ? (and are you storing raw, jpg, or __ ?)

(this is a semi-regular question on ask, and is probably ready for an update.. FWIW, I use google's free photo backup - free if you let them downsize the image.. )
posted by k5.user at 10:42 AM on October 14, 2016

Response by poster:

• If I lost the data, it would be incredibly heartbreaking, but I wouldn't have any monetary loss
• For the storage portion, I only need it accessible from home, but I'm serious about truly offsite backups, whether that means the cloud, or a copy stored at work and a copy stored across the country with a friend/family/etc
• Storing almost all raw, with some jpgs thrown in. Volume fluctuates depending on whether or not I'm doing anything interesting (traveling, e.g.), but I've generated something like 300GB in the past 4-6 months. So, not super high volume, but >>> current internal HD space, and probably accelerating
• Downsizing the image isn't really something I want to do

posted by Special Agent Dale Cooper at 11:02 AM on October 14, 2016

For convenience' sake, I would get a dock in order to do your mirroring. I do this (sans dock), and I keep one hard drive copy at work, one at my brother's house, and one in my home office. I am not a professional photographer by any means, but the photos I save are very valuable to me; I feel as if they are my life's work.

I keep multiple offsite copies because I am perhaps paranoid .. after all, a house fire is very very unlikely .. but saving to a NAS in your home would not protect from that. It's by far the least convenient method, but it works for me now that I've got it down to rote behavior.

it used to be that using Crashplan or several other online backup systems, you could send in a disk with your first large helping of data and then go from there .. I had no idea they offered to send a disk to you if you needed the files.

I do tend to shy away from network-based backup schemes, because it adds a set of requirements if/when you do want to recover something.
posted by dwbrant at 11:48 AM on October 14, 2016

I use Google photos, set to maintain original and not resize, and pay Google for space. It's really inexpensive plus lets you share things if you want to, etc.
posted by cmm at 11:48 AM on October 14, 2016

I have a NAS that I will copy my photos to right after I import them on my computer. The NAS will then upload them all to Google Drive by itself. I also have portable hard drives (2 at home and one at my office) where I keep backups.

The cards on my camera are 32GB/600 photos each (with 1 card backing up the other as they are being taken) and I don't delete the photos on them until after they've been imported to my computer, copied to the NAS and backed up to the portable hard drives at home. I only keep the most current year of photos on the computer because it takes up too much space. But by the time the previous year's photos have been deleted from the computer they are on 4 different hard drives and the cloud. Every year I'l run a file comparison tool (Winmerge) on everything just to make sure that everything is the same on all the hard drives.

I'm up to about 600GB and its working out fine so far. It would be a bigger problem if my storage needs increased faster than hard drive sizes did but I don't take that many photos. My setup is probably a bit too redundant/paranoid but I had a near miss when my portable hard drive containing my honeymoon photos was knocked off the table in the middle of being backed up once we got back home (the drive was toast but I had burned the photos onto DVDs during the honeymoon as a backup).

The Google Drive is actually the most useful part of it because it will take my backed up RAW files and turn them into photos I can view and share in Google Photos. Just this weekend I was able to pull up some photos to show at a family gathering and give my brother access to stuff he needs for a slide show all from my phone.

Also, the Surface has a micro SD slot. Buying a high capacity micro SD card is an easy way to increase your storage for things like photos.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:53 PM on October 14, 2016

Two (or more) external hard drives to rotate backups. Google Photos for offsite backup. Edit: just saw your RAW comment. Do the paid storage with Google Photos.
posted by LoveHam at 2:01 PM on October 14, 2016

I can relate to this.

All my photos are on external hard drives. One is permanently attached as primary storage. One is my backup drive (computer, not just photos). The third is offsite, updated monthly. Currently I have about 1.5tb of photos on each of these three.

I also use a photosharing site where most of my 'keepers' are stored on show.

I am looking at a full-frame dlsr in my near future, so file sizes will grow again. Keep this growth in mind when thinking about sizing of backups/primary storage.
posted by GeeEmm at 3:55 PM on October 14, 2016

I haven't tried it yet, but if you're an Amazon Prime member, you get unlimited photo storage there for free.
posted by getawaysticks at 7:08 AM on October 16, 2016

Hi, I'm the founder of PicBackMan where our mission is to address this exact use case and help people keep their memories safe. I would highly recommend storing your photo and video collection in atleast 2 online services so there is redundancy. You can choose Google Photos or Flickr or paid ones like SmugMug. There's also Dropbox and OneDrive. The challenge you'll typically face is the time it takes to upload all your photos to these online services - that's the exact problem we are solving with PicBackMan. Its an all-in-one uploader that helps you to automatically backup all your photos to one or more top online services. Users in 150+ countries use PicBackMan and I am sure you'll find it useful to achieve this. Here's the link: http://www.picbackman.com.
posted by picbackman at 9:50 PM on November 8, 2016