As you get deeper into retirement, you start to dread things breaking down and needing replacement. They're often big, expensive items, and we've had several recently unrelated plumbing and electrical issues, with multiple big-ticket items needing repair and/or replacement. Annoyingly, these are things that have to be replaced but don't get covered by standard insurance. You just have to grin and bear it. It is time to consider a careful division of limited retirement funds, what's most important to maintain and what could be tolerated or put off.
Unfortunately, the surprises just kept going on and on with different new problems.
Anyone know how to open the well-designed Lacie housing?
My current computer problems have become a low priority behind everything else? One extra problem arose when our washing machine flooded laundary and tripped the power. One of my attached drives in the studio failed to restart. I had been gradually building up a family photo library on it from my larger photographic collection. Unfortunately, it wasn't yet backed up. The same hard drive also now housed all my Wednesday Wanderers photos and had become the working area for my website updates, also not backed up.
Is this yet another disaster? Some of the working files are still around on my two working computers. I'm hopeful I can take the unresponsive Lacie drive apart and maybe recover what's on the disk if I can just open the well-designed housing.
The moral of the story? If things get tough, make sure you backup everything and don't just have a single copy of important computer files. Older and wiser, isn't that what they say...
I’ve not been so diligent; my "air gapped" archive/backup system has been sitting on the shelf for the past two years, gathering dust. You know how it goes. I had good intentions about checking those old hard drives every six months (they need to be "exercised" to stay healthy), but eye issues and life got in the way.
When I finally fired it up again, I accidentally left the Wi-Fi on, and Ubuntu immediately reminded me about updates. At first, I'd been avoiding updates thinking "I barely use any features, why bother?" But now seemed like the perfect time to upgrade and add some new tasks into the system.
Enhancing the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy
This whole approach really came out of the ransomware era (still very much a security problem). The idea is simple: keep an offline backup so you can recover if something goes wrong, and make sure you're actually verifying that your stored data is correct zero errors.
Just looking at a photo or document isn't enough to know if it's been corrupted or tampered with. How do you really check a file? It depends on the type of file and format, and there’s a growing miriad of different ones to worry about.
My Practical Approach
For photos, I'm using MD5 checksums, basically digital fingerprints for each file. Adobe has its own proprietary checksum system in Lightroom and new content credential tools, but I'd rather stick with the commonly used standard.
Raw files are trickier. They vary between camera manufacturers and have already changed over time and camera models.. Some photographers convert everything to lossless TIFF files (which can become huge), others swear by Adobe's DNG format, but I'm not seeing widespread adoption outside the Adobe ecosystem.
Video files are a more difficult area, they rapidly gobble up space and I've got formats from software I have no idea about. For now I will just have to stay with VLC video viewer, which seems to cover most video formats.
The Reality Check
I'm being realistic here, I’m getting older, and I have half a million photos. Nobody wants to wade through all of that when I'm gone. So instead of keeping everything organised just by date and time, I need to actually curate the mess and my legacy. Pull out the family photos, separate events and places, get rid of the junk. I'm planning to explore best ways to identify the high-value stuff worth preserving properly.
The plan is to do this reorganisation on my main computers first, then pass over a well-organised set of archives to the air-gapped system. It's a bit scary because I'll be deleting files, so I'm keeping the full backup for at least a year as a safety net. Currently sitting at 5.5 terabytes and hoping to cut my archive at least in half, but we'll see how realistic that is, same time next year.
Travelling with multiple devices means juggling way more than just your laptop and phone. Between my smartphone, Garmin watch, camera, and laptop, I've learned the hard way that forgetting the right cable or connector can add unnecessary stress to your trip.
The real challenge isn't the obvious stuff like chargers - it's all those little connectors and adapters that keep everything talking to each other. I've streamlined my setup into three essential kits that pack flat and won't eat up precious backpack space.
First up is my "USB Octopus" - a clever bundle of standard cables wrapped together with spiral cable wrap that folds into a neat circle. It handles all my older devices that still need dedicated connectors.
Next, I keep the modern adapters in a homemade green cloth wallet (thanks to my wife's sewing skills!) with sewn pockets and velcro closure. This holds my USB-C to HDMI adapter, USB-C hub, and other current-generation connectors. Don't forget an SD card reader if you're shooting photos!
Finally, there's my trusty external hard drive - an old 1TB unit that serves double duty as backup storage and entertainment centre. It keeps my work and photos safe while carrying a few movies and music for downtime.
The key is thinking beyond just power - you need connectivity, storage, and backup solutions all working together. Once you've got your system down, travelling with tech becomes much less stressful.
It's been a while since I posted here. Today I wanted to share some changes I've made to my backup and archiving strategies. Back in my consulting days, I relied on a NAS storage system, specifically a Netgear Stora. It had some fantastic automatic backup features, making it easy to keep duplicates of anything sent to it. It also allowed me to sync folders from each computer, ensuring only recent files were sent to the NAS. It was simple and reliable.
Fast forward to today, and retirement has brought about a shift in my storage needs. I no longer need to hold on to large amounts of client data. Also thanks to the relentless upgrades in Windows that unfortunately led to the demise of my previous backup Stora software, I can no longer use that NAS.
Rather than buy a New NAS system, I realised the bulk of my long-term storage is dedicated to my photography and art projects, totalling around 6 gigabytes. After spending a month decluttering duplicates and obvious duds, I repurposed older USB external drives no longer needed for client data for my photo archive. In addition to the current “originals on spinning discs connected to my main computer, and available across my LAN, I've organized them into three sets: one as a master archive in my office, and two duplicate sets rotated, with one stored off-site for added security. The rotation has been roughly monthly
Without a functioning NAS, I've reverted to a more manual approach, reminiscent of the magnetic tape days. I've set up a small, manually triggered incremental backup stream onto my locally held external archive sets.
Here's the breakdown of my new system:
I've allocated five folders with appropriate week names.
I manually perform the incremental backup at the end of each week.
At the end of the first week, I store all files that have changed since the beginning of the month in the respective weekly folder.
At the end of the second week, I copy all files changed since the beginning of the month, extending my increments back to the start of the month. I don't worry about overlapping days between months; those files go into the appropriate week's data set.
In months with only four weeks, I also copy the entire increment into week five, ensuring it contains the full month of new and changed files.
At the beginning of the next month, I clear out the first four weekly folders but keep week five, which now holds the backup of the previous month.
This system gives me a two-month window to recover files. While it might not be perfect, it's easy to manage and ensures the job gets done. Although I'm not backed up to the minute, the simplicity and ease of execution make it a viable solution for my needs. Plus, for anything super important, I can always make an additional copy to the current increment folder. Easy and quick!
I used ChatGPT to help proofread my typos etc, and simplify the text, most of which it did well BUT it clearly didn't understand my process and made up some stuff, so I've used the good bits, and corrected or deleted the rubbish
In our digital age, it has become increasingly important to
protect our personal data and information from accidental loss, malicious
individuals and cyber threats. Photos can hold a lot of sentimental value and unsuspected
personal information. A simple way to ensure the integrity of our photos is by
creating an MD5 hash code.
An MD5 hash code is a one-way encryption that produces a
fixed-length string of characters that is unique to the photo, and supposedly a
unique identifier. By checking an MD5 hash code for your photos, you can verify
that the photo has not been tampered with or altered in any way.
My heart sank recently when I realised I had a significant difference
in the archived directories and files saved during 2010. I have been using a
couple of repurposed old harddisk, standing in for one set of my photo archives,
and alas they are showing signs of aging, and probably slow failure. Maybe I’ve
been backing up a corrupted or damaged digital photo set. I hadn’t even gone
looking for photo there for a while.
Yet it wasn’t time to panic, I had actually gone back and generated
an MD5 hash code list for each directory of files (one list per monthly directory)
back in 2017. Despite having three versions of the archives (one possibly suspect)
and significant differences in files, these MD5 directory lists were largely the same and
when checked identified the missing files. Fortunately, there was always one
version of these missing files, sometimes in a different directory, and on checking they were photos I didn’t
want to keep (out of focus, almost duplicate shots, overexposed etc.). There
were just three photos in the end that may have gone astray. Trying to do this
by visually browsing the pictorial version of the photos amongst such a large
group of files would have been very difficult, if not almost impossible. So phew…
I didn’t find any corrupted files looking through the photos
or the MD5 Checks but I am confident the hash code will identify such damaged
files, but avoid overwriting older undamaged versions and unknowingly backing
them up. I can breathe easy now...
PS Another advantage of creating an MD5 hash codes for
photos is that it provides a way to detect if the photo has been tampered with
or modified. For example a hacker might encrypt the photo in order to send you a
ransome, the MD5 hash code will change, indicating that the photo has been
altered. To beat the hacker you should already have a viable backup, but you
will be able to avoid unknowingly backup his altered file(s) and could ignore
his ransome request.
It's December already and I'm still contemplating the Backtober idea. Something more distracting seems to arrive everytime I stop to consider a NAS (network storage) option, and I really haven't given trueNAS a real work-out yet either. What I have done is dropped back to the very old Grandfather,Father, Son Archive strategy from the days when anything off the computer was stored on large reels of magnetic tape. In those days Backup was rightly considered as different to Archive. Usually the backup set was in two parts Full (everything import) and Incremental (only those files that have changed since the last full backup).
What has helped is I am recycling the older USB portable hard drives to store different sets of the data I am now archiving (Largely photos, some finished videos and some PDFs & documents). Swapping them around to fit the file organization. Where once I had the oldest files on the smallest drives (they have been there all their lives) and the newest files on the larger drives (I was moving files to larger drives as I filled them). I now have all the oldest (and theoretically less accessed files on the larger newer drive) and most recent files on the smaller (and older drives). I'm also now convinced that drives need to be exercised (Rather than letting them slowly fail in a cupboard un-noticed so I am now reformating the grandfathers as I recycle them).
The three disks on the green sleeve also act as my Backup set, they are kept on my desk under the shelf/alcove lifting up my monitor to eye level. They are normally not connected to any computer but can be. When I retrieve my grandfather copy from remote storage I immediately clean off the disk (a full format as that does checks of the disk for problems and will map out and mark any problem areas).
I then run copies of the master data and folders on my computer(s) to the freshly formatted disk, There is lots of software to do this, I just used windows backup and restore features built-in windows 10/11. This can take a fair while so best done overnight or in the background. The Incremental Backup can be run manually, just copying files and folders you have been working on to the Incremental disk. This requires a bit of discipline but easy to do at the end of the day or as a task is finished. When I load a batch of photos from my camera I also direct copies to the incremental disk. Alternatively, you can use specialized backup software to automate the process.
I recently listened to a one of Brooks Jensen's "Here's a Thought" short daily podcasts called backtober Its about how he uses October each year to thoroughly review his digital back up and archives. He might be a bit obsessive, replacing any spinning hard drive older than 3 years, never less it has made me realize I need to totally re-evaluate my situation.
I have not found a good solution to replacing my little NAS unit. So automatic daily backups are not being made anymore!
Most of my archiving is now on external (spinning disk) hard drives, and unfortunately, I have experienced 4 of these drives crashing in the past decade. There were duplicates of these so I didn't actually lose anything, Duplicates were on another hard drive (ie same format/technology)
I do have archives up to 2010 on CD & DVD, They take up lots of space and I haven't touched them in years.
I have a fairly complete "extra" archive on a larger old hard disk that I can connect into my "air gapped" linux archive. When recently accessed one of these older disks started reporting errors (and will have to be replaced, but I'm out of old computer drives!)
I haven't evaluated the FreeNAS software yet!
It's October so I need to get onto these now, I like the idea of a full review yearly rather than my irregular monthly attentions (which has been overlooked a few times this year anyway).
My Linux/Mint Fileserver has already died three times in the past few weeks, The last time terminally, well I'd already swapped out two hard discs, which both crashed, didn't fancy wasting a third. So the much-altered old HP, aka Obsidan, has been consigned to the hard waste collection.
Graveyard of Hardware killed by Window10 Updates
Ok back to the Stora, but that's a hard luck story as well. It works but none of my current PCs, and other devices can run the software (incomnpatible drivers stop installation) or even access it via a browser, because Adobe flash is required, which even Adobe no longer support and have removed it from downloads. I had to use my Linux netbook to reconnect (it had old version of the stora software) and "recover" the data from the stora onto already overloaded external USB drives.
Rather than panic I'm going to limp along with a monthly backup based on two copies of data but an old fashion SON - FATHER - GRANDFATHER set of Archives of keepers (files & photos I believe are worth archiving. This involves serious CULLING.
Aren't bad things supposed to come in threes? I'm just experiencing fours, in terms of storage.
First, over a couple of weeks I saw warning from my android phone about occasional difficulty writing to the micro SD card, and then last week a warning to back it up followed by a note that it was unmounted. Fortunately when I took the card out of the phone I could read all its contents BUT I could not write to the card or even reformat it. Ok new card required (they are not all that expensive) and I had been doing monthly updates to my photo library. So nothing lost, at worst it might have been a few recent photos.
SO HAVE YOU BACKED UP THOSE PHOTOS ON YOUR PHONE RECENTLY? NO?
DO IT NOW.
I'm not going to go into detail but there are dozens of ways to get your photos off your phone, into the cloud and/or onto a computer Backup or Archive. Just expect your phone to be stolen, disappear, fall in the water or otherwise stop. If you have anything of personal value on it don't hesitate backup now!
Second was a strange corruption of a file on the memory card in my camera. At first I suspected the little USB card reader (which every now and the refuses to register on the device reading it). However swapping cards showed the problems was just a specific file on one SD card. Or the problem could be in the camera (hope not). Again the bigger faster SD cards I now use are more expensive but replacing it was an obvious tactic. Don't just leave your big SD cards to fill up. You can fit fair number of photos on 64GB and/or 128GB cards but then you loose a lot of photos if something goes wrong.
INGEST THOSE PHOTOS FOR YOUR SD CARD ONTO YOUR COMPUTER OR CLOUD REGULARLY!
DO IT NOW.
Third, I pulled out my backup portable hard drives (I have two set of 1TB & 2TB disks that I alternate one set in my office and one set offsite) in preparation for the monthly update and rotation. Unfortunately the one that was due to take the months incremental files was completed dead, No even a glimmer of life or flicker of the power on light. Again nothing lost, I still had the Master copy on my computer and the off site copy. However now replacement of the hard disk is starting to get expensive.
The final insult came in the form of a BIOS message as my ailing studio computer attempts to start up. The cost of and capacity of traditional spinning platter magnetic hard disks have improved a lot, prices for the same capacity are significantly lower and the capacity has increased. However now there is the added complication and difficulty of opening up the computer finding the right replacement and the time to restore all the data, programs and get things back to normal. The cost of paying someone else to do this will be frightening.
RESTORING A COMPUTER THAT HAS CRASHED CAN BE A LENGTHY AND TEDIOUS PROCESS. IS YOUR DATA ROUTINELY BACKED UP? DO YOU HAVE A RECOVERY BACKUP?
Since using Photo Mechanic to load my photos from the SD cards onto my little HP spectre, I’ve changed over to not immediately deleting the photos from the card. Even though I have set Photo Mechanic to make a second copy as it uploads. Instead I leave the card for a few days till it fills to about 2/3rd. I have five 16GB cards so I can last a couple of weeks before I need to clean the cards, by which time I have plenty of opportunity the photos safely backed up to one of two 1TB portable drives (in the Red cases) that I carry as I travel.
I store my SD cards in the little blue case , and have adopted the process of turning them one way when they are empty and reversing them the another when they are full enough. Well that’s the theory.
Last night I took a lot of photos of the sunset, two cruise ship leaving port, and the CARD FULL message just as some fireworks started. I grabbed card case and swapped the cards but I was a bit late to get the best of the fireworks, This seemed to go well Until I got back to the hotel room. I put the full card in the reader and it was EMPTY! Worse the new card from the camera also reported it was empty. I got out a third card and it worked fine. Hmmm! I feared the worse and downloaded Recuva, (a disk file recovery tool I have used before and trust). A couple of very long deep recovery later only turned up old photos and some corrupted files. Rather than panic I figure I should just leave the cards and pack them away and not reuse them as I was travelling.
Next morning I got out my camera and got a fresh card from my card wallet and as soon as I turned the camera on there was the CARD FULL message again. My first reaction was that the camera must be corrupted the cards. Arrrh!
Then it struck me there was a simple explanation, In the dark last night I got the direction of the cards mixed up. The full card was always safe in the blue case and I was trying to red cards I had already cleaned. So I didn’t loose my great sunset shots, and I will pay more attention which way by cards are facing.
I had a perfect storm of issues over the past week. I had the April Update of windows 10 forced on my computer and in the process the Homegroup networking just disappeared along with some of the network drive letter I used to share folders across my local area network. Also the NBN line to the internet (and my phones) dropped out and took many mobile phone calls to report and get re-established. NBN is not a popular word around here. When the internet was back the modem and router began playing up, WiFi dropping out and weird things happened across my network, including my Netgear Stora NAS (Network Attached Storage) which I use for backup/disk mirroring went silent and these was the pain of another few days of reporting problems. Long hours of automated phne system and support calls and just general frustration. Then horror I noticed all my photos from 2017 & 2014 and most of my 2018 photos had disappeared off my network. Worse my two external portable hard drives, also seem to have lost the same folders. It all happened so fast I knew it could not possible be an accidental deletion and the two external hard drives where not connected to anything at the time. So how could they possibly have lost the data. Time to panic? It could have been BUT last year I had set up an “Air Gapped” Archive, on a Linux computer that was not attached to the internet (or my Local area network). My original plan was to rotate these on a three generation Son-Father- Grandfather cycle and store the grandfather off-site. However as I have only been updating the cycle every-six months (my original plan was every three months)using old computer hard drives. I only have two generations and they are both here. So I broke out the father copy and fired up my little Linux machine. It took a while but what a relief all the missing directories and photos where there. Next the son copy, all there as well, actually only up to mid December last year when I did the last archive backup. So I could be missing a few months, bummer! I unplug my archive drive and went and got one of my external backup drive, the one I knew I had used most recently, to my surprise all the missing folders where there and full of my recent photos. In disbelief I unplugged it (after a safe to remove step) and took it back to my desktop, no folders again. What is going on? I took the external drive to my laptop also connected to my LAN, the missing folders and photos could not be found. Back to my linux machine and they are there! What a mystery?
Actually I wasn’t so surprised I felt strongly that it was impossible that so many files on different media and places would instantly disappear. However at the moment I don’t understand why this happened. I’m just very glad I put some time into planning an archive system (with backups of the archive).
If you haven’t already got a backup system in place for your growing photo collection go and do it now. Then before to long plan how best to archive the collection!
I had though a lot about which camera (or camera body) to take as my backup on my Kimberley Cruise, the latest of my Endless Summer trips. The logical choice was my old Pentax K100 body, if was just for backup and it takes the other lenses I was carrying. In the past an important aspects is it takes 4 standard AA batteries (which can be bought almost anywhere, even on cruise boats!), if power to recharge batteries wasn’t available. I carry spare recharged batteries and they last several days so that is seldom and issue. Instead I choose to take my trusty old Canon Rebel (EOS 1100D), which was basically my work camera used in mines and for making training videos (it has decent quality video except for the sound). Its pretty light and plastic and whilst I have had two lenses fail it has taken the rough and tumble well. With a small zip bag of accessories I planned to put in my art kit backpack. Storing it, with lenses detached, in my computer backpack on airline flights. Well that was the theory.
This last minute inclusion became my main camera in a lot of situations. The reason was a cheap wrist strap and sling system I bought just before the trip. I love the wrist strap! I have always hated the camera maker supplied neck straps! What proved invaluable clambering over rocks, landing on mudflats and beaches in the Kimberley was the over shoulder sling. Just a word of warning to use this style of sling you must be happy for the camera to hang upside down at your side. This leaves your hands free to do the climbing and support stuff with the camera with the lens aligned beside you body just above your hip is safely out of the action (you should adjust to find the safest most comfortable spot using the clips on the strap accordingly). Rather than sticking out in front of your chest, which in many situations is in harms way. I tended to leave my bulkier Pentax in its camera bag, which was awkward and sometimes inconvenient in rock hoping situations. It was thus left behind in many landings and zodiac trips. The camera and I where safe hanging on my side but I could also quickly grab the camera in one hand, lift it to my eye focus and take a photo. With the result that a lot of my better photos where taken with this second shooter.
Against my better judgement, I left google photo on my new android phone, It immediately insinuated itself into my photos uploading everything (yes I have checked the only upload photo on WiFi connection option). I then just ignore it. Well it did keep updating itself and occasionally asking if it could vacuum up (it uses the term backup) any images saved it new folders on the phone. I got one or two excited notification that the assistant had made a very lame slide show it called a movie or had enhanced one of my images (made it black and white). So I figure its mostly harmless and just keep saying no.
At their recent I/O conference, supposedly for developers, Google announced an upgrade to google photos, included improved sharing, a photobook printing service and a new feature to come called Google lens (a turbo AI charged version of google goggles that will start adding details of what you photographed to you photo’s presumably captions or metadata (read that as where to buy it)
This is google’s mobile phone oriented hype (promotional clip) to make sharing look great, and not something more akin to skynet. I’m not thinking it is so intentionally sinister, its more just a feeble “Emperor's New Clothes” metaphor/slight of hand trick to open up and share even more of you private life with a colossal secretive corporation, who make there money selling such stuff to advertisers (oh yes and the NSA and perhaps others also vacuum it up as well.)
Well there are legitimate reason to want to share photos, firstly publically, so as for a blog post or privately just for the eyes of family and friends. I still use google photo via open writer (an open source version of microsoft’s now defunct Live Writer blogging tool). Once upon a time when google photos was picasa web album you could also get a link to the ,jpeg file or embedded code that could be pasted in any regular HTML. Not any more I’m afraid, google will only let you play like that to google+, facebook and twitter (yes not even blogger). While the Open Writer connection still works I will keep using it but I am now a little less confident in its long term availability.
There are better places to publically share your photos, eg dropbox or flickr.
The private sharing is via share albums which you can allow others, with valid google accounts) to have access. Which is an improvement on having to make things publically viewable if you want to share.
The facial recognition isn’t to bad (possibly better than picasa’s)and once you identify them, add their google account IDs to the face and authorization to share with them and photos of friends and family can trigger a notification that you have a new photo of them, and they will be able to access the photo. I’m guessing this aimed at overly social teens and twenty something’s but I can see it ending in tears and regrets.
Unfortunately despite the claim better organization of your images via AI, the misclassification of places and things in my images is still overwhelmingly woeful. Ok I tend not to take tourist shots and I have travelled a lot BUT to only about half the places google think I’ve been. Under things I saw I’d supposedly taken about 50 shot of auroras! That is one of my biggest photographic desires and whilst I perhaps could have last weekend I am positive I never have. They were mainly star images with light horizons, nothing like auroras. The closest image was a strange green light I photographed in April 2010, it was in the western sky not the south and whilst i can’t explain it is probably not an aurora. (Google you keep disappointing me)
I also went on-line to my google photos web page, and its much the same as the last “upgrade” two year ago, but I did notice a new item called ARCHIVE with a new sticker beside it. Please don’t be decieved this isn’t anything like an archive it will keep all the photos but wont show then in the normal photos view. Presumably because people soon realis4 it is a very cluttered place it might be a much better alternative to not upload them in the first place. I must again stress google photo is not a safe place to store your only copy of your digital photos. If you must it can be used as one offsite place to have as a backup (particularly og phone photos) provide you have another backup under you control (like on your computers hard disk)
So I will keep any open mind, keep using google photos to hold my blog images and let it upload photos from my phone but I am unlikely to return to using google photos as my on-line place of choice to share or organise photos.
The Wanna.cry hullaballoo brings to light the vulnerability of keeping your photo collection on-line, on a computer or phone but in one place. This is running a big risk, do something about it now.
Avoiding most Ransomware, is not difficult, its just needs you to make small changes in normal behavior and regularly be wear of or do a few things. Be careful about clicking on links in unsolicited emails and phone message that have the characteristics of a phishing exploit. Be aware of identity fraud and becoming a little more private, be careful and aware in what you share. Even basic snapshots can hide a lot of useful information to a stalker (eg location) or hacker. A good example is the common trend for people to post their boarding passes from the airport gate on Instagram or Facebook which gave hackers enough personal information to gain free entry into accumulated frequent flyer points which they immediately stole. The most important protection is keeping your security/protection measures up to date. Which means installing rather than ignoring those security updates. The final and most important way to not be caught out with ransom wear is to keep an up to date backup, under your control, then the ransom on on a web site/computer becomes meaningless.
However ransomware, virus or worms are not your only risks, Equipment loss damage of malfunction is a much higher possibility and in some cases approaching a certainty. In the case of mechanical spinning harddisk it is a certainty that they will eventually fail (fortunately generally their life will be about 20 plus years). Equipment particular smaller portable items are also prone to get damaged or lost. Mobile phone really don’t like getting wet or dropped. There contents sometimes survive, particularly if have them on a microSD card but I hear many sad stories of photos lost this way. Making sure your phones get backed up properly is the guaranteed way to avoid the risk. Sure you can sometimes recover files from damage harddrives and phones but it can be very expensive, its much easily to go get new equipment (your going top have to spend that money anyway and pick up an reload from your backup.
So what is proper backup. There is lots of advice on the net but the best approach is the 3-2-1 method (see the basics in the David Bergman Video above). Have three copies (yes three) on two media/devices (eg disk, DVD etc) and one copy off-site (eg on-line, bank vault, a friend house across town). There is a lot of options in how you actual do these steps and set up something you can easily manage. It may involve some extra expense (like buying a second hard drive subscribing to an on-line backup service) but remember you are responsible and the should take control of the steps (ie don’t expect a free social media service to do anything special about “your” photos.)
Go start that 3-2-1 backup today, don’t delay it could be too late!
Backing up the actual photo files is also only part of the issue. There are important aspects like how you rate the images and organize them, and in the case of non-destructive editors how the image has been manipulated. Some of this information can be written back into the header of Jpeg files but most photo processing software today stores this separate to the software. In the case of lightroom it is all stored in database its calls the catalogue. other software such as picasa store this data in a special ini file in each directory containing photos. The original adobe bridge software stored the information in a readable ascii companion file (.xmp) normally known as a sidecar file. Whilst these are not standard, and adobe itself has muddied the waters by changing some format so you need to know the ,they have been around a long while and many other software packages can at least read the metadata and ratings in these files. Some packages (like Corel’s Aftershot Pro and XnView) can also write the basic .xmp files. You need to look at the help (or manual) for the software you used and work out where these files are and how copies can be included in your normal back up set. While Lightroom does itself keep a separate backup of its catalogue it is likely to be on the same computer as the software and photo library. So it is important to include this in the 3-2-1 steps.
If you’re a regulkar reader of this blog, you will know I keep harping on the issue that backups are different to archives, but while they are also copies they should be organized in such a way that photos can be easily found (that metadata discussed above) and there is also the even bigger issue of what format have the best longevity.
Backup your software and operating system by creating a recovery disk (eg in Windows 10, you get the opportunity to create some recover media from which you can reboot your computer) in the case of hardware or software problems. Its fairly large so you will probably need a 16 GB USB drive. I made mine (for my three windows 10 computer) in fluro green) so they look different to any other USB memory key I have. Luck I made the effort because my main desktop reported an update error, and after clearing the upload and reloading the security patched it still seemed unhappy and after the next shutdown it refused to start. Rather than panic I got out the recovery key and rebooted from the USB. Five minutes later I had my desktop back. So make that recover media now. Another item you must remember to backup is the software you use to view your photos plus the registration Keys that you got when you purchased the software. Don’t assumed that you will be able to always download older version of the software. I know corel, adobe and microsoft are not making what they consider superseded available for download. So Search out that install package and include it in your photo backup. Digital photos are binary files and need to be interpreted and rendered to suit your output device, by software. The big risk with proprietary RAW photo format (which many on-line photographers encourage you to use) is they may not be supported in future software. Jpeg is an accepted public standard and so ubiquitous that it is unlike to not be viewable but .DNG, .CR2 .Nef etc might be a little like having a beta Max tape but no player.
Regularly make your best/favorite/precious photos in photobooks, or at least 4” by 6” (10 by 15cm) prints. This is really a physical variation on the backup (in another media) but it does work. Think of all those old shoe boxes with photos from your parents, that have survived the years. Unfortunately many get trashed in post death cleanups. They are controlled by you but can still be more directly/privately shared by you to just those you want to see them.
“Privacy is becoming a privilege” … Paul Thurrott (Windows weekly podcast)
I am very diligent carrying two portable USB (backpack style) hard disks for ensuring I have good backup while I’m on the road. One disk, I’ll call the “son” is used just after I’ve loaded and culled my photos. Once the backup is complete I then have two copies, one on my computer and the other on the backup disk so this is the time I also reformat the SD cards on my camera. I used to let picasa delete photos it loaded, and never had any problem with that process, but occasionally later I get a card not recognized in both of my camera and reformatting in the camera fixed that.
Then after a few days, occasionally up to a week, or if I have taken a lot of photos I may do it daily. I use the other backup, which I called the “father”, to get copies of all new photos (ie an incremental backup since the previous backup). Then put it back in my luggage.
This process has served me well.
I’ve now got a slightly different processes for “archiving” my lightroom work. At the end of the month, or close to it I backup my lightoom catalogue and setting files onto the “son” backup disk, in a directory called lightroom_back. I also move all the previous months photos (ie at the moment that was march) off my HP spectre which only has a 250 GB SSD drive, also onto the son drive. I do this move outside lightroom, despite all the warnings not to more files outside lightroom, because it is a lot simpler. Inside lightoom all the photos removed now have the little box and question mark in the top right (hovering the mouse over this shows the warning “Photos is missing”. Now providing I have preserved the directory structure I can relink all the photos in a given day in one process by right clicking on the directory containing the now missing files. Selecting the find missing folder and using the normal browse process to find the location of the directory containing that days photos on the external drive. The process needs to be repeated for each day but that doesn’t take long.
The final step is this “son” drive retires and become a new “father” and goes back in the luggage. The old “father” gets reborn as the new “son”. I also normally delete the previous lightroom catalogue backup from this disk to avoid confusion and possibility of loading the old catalogue.
This has worked wonderfully for three months now. However when undertaking the reconnection of the files it lightroom I was obviously distracted and didn’t finish. Worst I had unplugged the USB disk but left it on the table in the hotel (it would normally have gone into my luggage) A day or so later and many miles away I realise it was missing and a checked with the hotel confirmed they had found my disk, phew!…. and I can pick it up in a couple weeks as I pass through town again. That’s ok this is off-site backup.
Yesterday morning while having breakfast on the terrace of the apartment I’m staying in now, suddenly fire alarms where going off everywhere. I didn’t panic, I had off-site backup! It was a false alarm anyway, someone might have burnt their toast. Lucky I was carry two backup external drives.
The recent hassles with a couple of my hardrive backups has got me thinking again about creating a real long term archive, one that will be useful to someone else. It is a total can of worms because the formats are not all the same, I have mainly jpeg (.jpg) version of most things but I also have original RAW files and some post processed versions as .tiff and occasionally .psd formats. It would be presumptive of me to assume that however gets the drive will know about these formats and have the software to be able to read them (the exception being the jpeg format).
I had contemplated including a downloaded (install/setup) version of adobe bridge for both Window and Mac operating systems. Instead I opted for something that doesn’t require installing and can be just run from the archive disk itself. What I choose was XnViewPortable, one of the portable apps that I have on my travelling DarkRoom USB key. It is the one viewer I have found that handles an amazing number of formats. As well as JPEG it seems to handle most RAW file format including .cr2 .pef & .dng and also handles .tiff and .psd. So all the formats I currently use could be viewed. This program is a single .exe file that can be run on any DOS or microsoft windows operating system. There is also a version called XnViewMP that allow for the other operating systems (eg. Mac & Linux) to view all these formats so I also include the READ.ME file below on the Archive Disk.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This disk contains archived photographs, in a variety of formats. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The subdirectory XnViewProtable contains a viewer program that can be run on any Microsoft Windows computer. If you want to view the photos on other operating systems look for the program XnViewMP (the MP stands for multi-platform) on the internet and download the version for your operating system. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To add to my woes with the exploding DNG files, I discovered that two of my hard drives used for my photo backups and archives had died! The first an older Western Digital taken from a retired computer (it may have been about 4 years old) just refused to be read. it was spinning and sounded normal but would just not load up its directory or any files. Unfortunately it is the only backup hard disk of all my early photos. I do have CD/DVD copies of most and all are on a separate copy on my archive hard drive currently connected to my network. Thus I theoretically have 2 copies (no longer three). I tried using a couple of recovery programs that have worked for me before but I only got a few snippets of binary gibberish. I tried reformatting the disk which took forever and wrote a few files, again taking for ever. However once I unmounted and remounted it nothing again. So this drive is TRUELY DEAD (fifth western digital to fail me). The portable style seagate (about 3 years old) is unfortunately holding backup of my recent photos and there is no DVD backup set. It was intended to be my off-site copy but I just hadn’t got around to that. However I can read what is on it, I just can not write any new files although there is plenty of space. Does not seem to be a security/ownership thing. So I’m risking it with one archive and backups on my travelling hard drives for files not already written to it. I’m also doing DVD backs of recent files as well as an interim step.
Looks like I’m up for two more off-site back up drives.
The lesson I’ve (re-) learned
You need to take you backup drives (or any media) out occasionally and exercise them to check their health.
I definitely don’t want to create a panic, so I need to careful in what I am warning here. The past few months have seen several disappointing announcements from those offering “free” photo storage on social media services. The ”One place for all your photos”was a claim that worried me from the start. Social media services are definitely not the only place to store your photos. You can use them to share selected photos but trusting them with the only copy is very dangerous. They have already shown that they change their minds, sell the business and/or possibly will even shut up shop.
So before the crying and gnashing of teeth stage. If you don’t have copies elsewhere it is time to make sure you do. Backup those on-line photos now
Bulk Downloading from Flickr
No so long ago you would have had to do it one photo at a time or better still one album at a time (look for the download arrow icon). Now with this the new camera roll feature it is even easier. You can just select all (which does select all your photos, so definitely don’t press delete, the red rubbish bin on the left hand side) on each grouping the the camera roll. You can then move onto the next grouping and press select all again, which add the new set to the selection bar at the bottom of the screen. Normally the camera roll is order by date (either taken of uploaded) and this is a good way to structure your downloads, say my month or by year. However remember if you have uploaded a lot of images it can take a fair while to download a really large collection and it might be wise to break the downloads into logical groups. If you are more interested in organizing your collection by theme you can consider using the magic view to help you select batches of images to download in thematic groupings (there may be a few miss-classifications).
Bulk Downloading from Google Photos
Despite the promises about recognizing how much work people have put into saving and organizing their photos in picasa. Google have been quiet about how to save any on-line uploads from Picasa into picasa web albums. The picas web photos are still on-line but now they are in Google Photos. However finding where to download them is no longer as simple as finding the download to Picasa button. Both the the individual and album views have three vertically arranged dots in the upper right corner, which signify more options. Clicking on these dots brings up an action sub-menu which contains the download feature. It the case of albums it is a download all. I haven’t found a way to selectively bulk download. If you are using auto-backup the photos will be grouped by date (each date will be its own album)
Remember :: It is the right time to Backup those on-line photos now
PS (May 2016) I have discovered you can bulk download everything using google's takeout service
This is something that keeps bugging me about ALL photo management systems. There is plenty of discussion about backups but scant regard for archives. A backup is pretty easy to understand and do, it is a second copy. The concept for computer files (or any digital information) being that if something goes wrong, I can just go the backup and recover what was lost or destroyed. This is easy enough to understand for one file, a day or month’s photos but gets a bit trickier as information mounts over a year or more. Do you keep backing up everything or start a new series of backups. For those with decent DSLR cameras with high megapixel counts that means buying new and bigger external USB drive or more racks on a RAID System or Drobo. There are good strategies to safely tame this plethora of images but I need to get back to the difference of true Archives.
An archive, is also likely to be a copy but it has two key differences to a backup. The first and most important is it must provide easy access to find the photo (or digital files). This first requirements means there must be a catalogue or index of how best to find the photo. This requires that the storage be organized in such a way that the important characteristics can be recorded where necessary but also that the storage location is recorded as well. The second difference has to do with the physical format of the storage media, where it is stored and how likely that media is likely to be readable in the future. Is the catalogue always available or is it also buried in the data.
Today I will talk a little about this second issues and keep the idea of an index of catalogue for a number of future posts.
I have for several years maintained 3 archives. I have one live on an external harddisk with 2GB capacity, and two CD/DVD collections stored at two different locations (one well off site). Managing and searching in them is starting to become a daunting task (ie locating the right disk and then looking through them takes time, despite being logically labelled and well stored, in suitable storage boxes). Further I’m getting close to that 2GB of photos now. So I have opted to put at least one of the stored archives also on hard disk (or more precisely a couple of hard disks). I do have strong desire not to keep buying bigger and newer gear, so I purchased a small USB hard drive dock (mine is the Shintaro) and it can read both 2.5”and 3.5” SATA HHD drives and also has an e-sata cable. So all I had to do is take the hard drives out of older computers (which I always do before I scrap them) and now I have extra external storage. They are of course slower than a new drive and some of my older drives are smaller 512MB. However Importantly I am not letting my personal and business data get out into the wild (it is well overwritten by photos) and I am also getting a more easily stored medium (a 2.5” 1 TB drive, holding a decade of photos takes up less room than 4 or 5 DVDs roughly a month of my shooting). I did however required two old drives to backup my current archive, but I have several so I might end up using this set this year and cycling over to another pair next year.
Trying to contemplate the best way to do incremental backups (monthly) to a remote disk, has left me sticking with the DVDs as the best option for the time being.
The biggest issue in setting up a long term digital archive is related to what physical storage media you plan to use. The digital world is littered with various storage media that have very short operation lives and/or have fallen from common usage. I have used Punch paper tape, Punch Card, Reel to Reel Magnetic tape, Various Tape Cartridges, 8”Floppy Disk (yes they were once that big but they could hold around 1.3mb), 5¼” Floppy Disk (only 360kb), 3 ½” Rigid disk (720kb but later 1.4mb), Zip Disks (a glorious 100mb), CDs (compact disks with a capacity of around 700MB) on to DVD (which generally hold 4.7gb) and Blu-ray (which can hold up to 25gb). Unfortunately the unspoken secret here is as the capacity and specifically the information density has increased the shelf life tends to decrease. The punch paper tape for the late 60s is good to go (if only I had a reader) if it hasn’t been torn, so are the punch cards from the early 70s, but everything else has probably reached its best by date and there is a reasonable chance you will experience corruption or errors reading older media already. Even CD and DVDs, once thought invincible start to have troubles after only a few years, even less if they are not handled carefully. What about solid state memory (like SD memory cards, USB keys or the newer SSD drives), unfortunately they have limited life spans as well (more to do with the number of reads and writes) in normal usage they may outlast the next form of storage HDD. The conventional hard drives (whether built into your computer or as an external USB style) also have some telling untold secrets (see backblaze study, which suggests seagate drives are more likely to fail than western digital, but I have had the opposite experience I have 4 dead western digital my book USB drives but 3 healthy expansion seagate drives, one of which considerably older). The caveat here is they will probably last a day or two longer than the guarantee. So what about cloud storage that’s forever isn’t it? Well if you look in the terms of Service (TOS) or most cloud service providers there is generally no mention of loss or damage of stored data (I guess they assume you must already have a copy as well, ie from their point of view the data is backed up by you). Only Amazon seems to have addressed this, and I hope companies like google could be relied upon. However they are companies that are unlikely to last forever. So cloud backup is where we are at now, not cloud archiving yet. So where does that leave us. We will need to plan to regularly move any digital archive onto new media as technology change and popular taste determines. Clearly an Archive of Digital Photos must not be hardware/media specific.
I trust all this scares you into making a backup of your digital photos right now. Stop reading and go and do it!
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Backup your software and operating system by creating a recovery disk (eg in Windows 10, you get the opportunity to create some recover media from which you can reboot your computer) in the case of hardware or software problems. Its fairly large so you will probably need a 16 GB USB drive. I made mine (for my three windows 10 computer) in fluro green) so they look different to any other USB memory key I have. Luck I made the effort because my main desktop reported an update error, and after clearing the upload and reloading the security patched it still seemed unhappy and after the next shutdown it refused to start. Rather than panic I got out the recovery key and rebooted from the USB. Five minutes later I had my desktop back. So make that recover media now. Another item you must remember to backup is the software you use to view your photos plus the registration Keys that you got when you purchased the software. Don’t assumed that you will be able to always download older version of the software. I know corel, adobe and microsoft are not making what they consider superseded available for download. So Search out that install package and include it in your photo backup. Digital photos are binary files and need to be interpreted and rendered to suit your output device, by software. The big risk with proprietary RAW photo format (which many on-line photographers encourage you to use) is they may not be supported in future software. Jpeg is an accepted public standard and so ubiquitous that it is unlike to not be viewable but .DNG, .CR2 .Nef etc might be a little like having a beta Max tape but no player. 
