Make your images last Page 2 of 3

Don’t let your photos go up in smoke—develop a backup strategy now

Backup strategy: The anxious parent

Who: This parent of two young and very photogenic children takes lots of snapshots to send to friends and family members. Protecting these valuable memories is his chief concern, even if it costs a bit of money.

The big picture

Snapping the shot is just the beginning. Here’s how to prepare, print, and protect your digital photos.

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The Solution: Because he has just a few gigabytes of photos so far, he chooses recordable DVDs for his backup medium. Every month or so, he burns two DVDs from within iPhoto, leaving one of them at his office for safekeeping. When he needs to make space on his hard drive, he creates a catalog before making a DVD archive. Knowing that those DVDs may not last forever, he makes an annual routine of duplicating last year’s DVD archives. He also spends $30 a year for a standard Smugmug account, so he can keep copies of all his photos safely online and easily share them with family members.

Backup strategy: The professional photographer

Who: For this pro, thousands of high-resolution digital photos aren’t just memories—they’re business. So locating and accessing archived photos rapidly is essential, and bulletproof backups are worth some extra expense.

The Solution: To efficiently catalog all her photos, she uses iView MediaPro, which automatically updates its records whenever she moves photos around. Even if the originals are on a volume that isn’t currently available, she can still find the photos she needs.

Because she must keep a large number of photos available for active use, she uses a pair of external hard drives as her backup medium—always keeping one safely off-site (and swapping them weekly). She uses the Backup Server script in EMC Dantz’s Retrospect Desktop to ensure that the drive that’s attached is always up-to-date.

Finally, she periodically archives older projects onto MO discs for long-term storage. iView MediaPro keeps those photos in its catalog, so she can retrieve them easily when she needs to.

Backup strategy: The budget-minded amateur

Who: A casual photographer who takes a relatively small number of photos on vacations and special occasions, she wants to protect her collection but is on a strict budget. Because she rarely needs to use archived photos, fast access is not crucial.

The Solution: For a backup medium, she chooses inexpensive recordable CDs. Because she uses her Mac’s built-in SuperDrive, she doesn’t need any additional hardware. Whenever she adds a large number of photos to her collection, she burns a CD from within iPhoto. When she needs to clear space on her hard drive, she burns an extra copy of some older photos to CDs, just to be safe, and then deletes them from iPhoto. She also uses a Kodak EasyShare Gallery account as a free secondary location to store and share photos (she orders at least a few prints each year to keep the account active).

Keep track of iPhoto backups

Before burning a group of photos to a disc, consider putting them all into one folder or album, so you’ll be able to tell later on which photos went onto which disc. (iPhoto 5 conveniently lets you group multiple albums in one folder.) Give the folder or album the same name that you give the disc itself. And be sure to label the disc, too.