Gloucester Camera Club

By Mark Kemp

I am a professional electronics engineer and designer and have been interested in computers since before I had a ZX Spectrum and I have always been told that there are only 2 rules to remember in computing;

Rule Number One – Always keep backups.

Rule Number Two – Never forget about rule number one.

It is something I often remind people of at the club, but it is fundamentally important. No matter what problems or disasters your computer may suffer from you can always recover if you have a backup. If you haven’t that’s it. Computer data is transient and if it’s gone it’s gone, forever.

For us digital photographers it is mainly our images that we should backup. Broken hardware can be replaced; programs can be reinstalled, but that one fantastic winning shot cannot be taken again. Also after hours of work on Photoshop it would a bit annoying to erase the result by mistake and have to start again. So we need to concentrate on backing up our basic photos as taken and the results of any work we have done to improve them. Of course if you have other uses for your computer you should also consider backing up any other work you have as well, not just photographs.

Most digital photographers will take some pictures and when they get home, or a week or two later, copy them to hard drive. Then eventually the camera’s memory cards are erased and used for new photos. This is fine but all our eggs are in one basket, first the card and then the hard drive. If either fails goodbye images, all of them! If you only have one copy you do not have a backup.

A backup is a second (at least) copy on another physical device. That way, unless you are really unlucky, they don’t both fail at the same time and nothing is lost.

It is sometimes said that every copy loses quality, but this is not exactly true. If you open an image with some software, manipulate it and close it again many times you will probably degrade the quality. If you just copy the image file many times, every one will be identical.

There are many ways to back up data, but the most common ones are CDs or DVDs, second hard drives or tapes. Tapes are mostly used by large companies and are generally a bit expensive for home use, so we will concentrate on second hard drives and optical discs.

The cheapest option is probably an optical disk. CDs, DVDs and now dual layer DVDs are all optical disks as they store and read data using lasers. Most computers already have a drive capable of writing one or more of these formats so you only need to buy blank discs. A CD will hold about 650Mb a DVD about 4.7 GB and a dual layer about 8GB (roughly) so you need to choose one large enough to hold the images you want to backup and compatible with your drive.
In order to copy files to an optical disc you usually use a particular program for that task. Easy CD creator and Nero are both quite common. In general you prepare a list of files to be copied and then ‘burn’ the disc. This can take a little while but is fairly automatic. You may be asked whether you want to burn a multisession disc. This means that if there is spare space on the disc you could add more files later. This sounds like an attractive option but I would advise against it. The problem is that multisession discs are much less compatible with other computers and software so it could be harder to retrieve your data. The discs are relatively cheap so it is not worth the risk for the money saved.

Another important point to consider is that a disc should be checked before it is put away. If you don’t check the disc, you don’t know if you have a useful backup or a shiny tea cup stand! Many people complain that their backup discs failed at some point while they were stored, when in fact they were never written properly in the first place. At the very least the writing software should be set to automatically verify the disc after burning, but ideally you will also check the disc by hand as well. Just take the finished disc from the drive then put it back and look at some of the pictures to see that they are really there.

Everyone has heard all the horror stories about failed discs and you could be forgiven for thinking that CDs have a shelf life of a few minutes from the way some people talk. It is true that discs sometimes fail, or were never even written properly as I said. But this is not that common. Nothing is indestructible or lasts forever but CDs and DVDs do not fail that often either. They are used in the millions, if not billions all around the world and that just wouldn’t happen if their reliability was that poor. They are also the backup, so that you still have the original copy if the backup is lost. You only have a problem if both copies fail. You can even reduce these odds by making more than one optical disk copy, the more the better. I generally record all the pictures from one days shooting on a disc, but if there is room I will also add the previous set of pictures as well, that way I have at least two copies plus the original.

The other favourite argument of the doomsayers is that technology moves on too quickly and you won’t be able to read your CDs in a year’s time. Well suitable readers may eventually become old technology and not be standard on new computers anymore, but that doesn’t mean that they all cease to exist. You have one on your computer now, be sure to ask for one on your next machine when you upgrade. If you can’t get one, just keep the one from your present machine. It will still work just as well. But even if you eventually abandon your optical disk backups in favour of newer technology it won’t matter. They are just the backups; the main copies are on your hard drive. Computers are commonly and easily connected together with networks these days and copying files from your old hard drive to your new one is standard practice. It is fairly easy to do, but if you can’t there are many commercial firms who will do it for you.

This brings us on to the other method of keeping backups, a second hard drive. Hard drives are not very expensive these days even in very big capacities and there is a very large market in external second drives. These are usually connected by a USB port but could also use Firewire or even Ethernet. They are simplicity itself to use as they just appear as another drive on your machine and can just drag and drop files to copy them whenever you want. Alternatively most are supplied with software that makes regular scheduled backups for you. This simply copies your main hard drive to the external one every day or week automatically. That way you can never lose more than a day or a week’s worth of photos if your main disk should fail. Either way you have two copies of everything you want to protect. Another option is to use an old PC with a large hard drive in it as a backup machine and connect it to your main PC with Ethernet so that they can share files. That means you get a little more life out of your old machine and also could even use the old one if the main one had a fault.

The last option to consider is also making an offsite backup. Make an extra copy and ask a friend or relative to keep them for you, just in case. There are even some organisations that will provide this service commercially. Files are either sent on a CD or more commonly transferred via the internet to the companies secure locations for safekeeping. This is not, however a cheap option, especially considering the amount of storage a typical photographer would need.

Just remember the rules!