How to keep your photos safe

[DCramer]

Great advice morts. Another option is using online backup services. I use dropbox (not a plug - a great service that i use and love) https://www.getdropbox.com/
it essentually clones a selected portion of your drive online for you to access anytime anywhere and its secure.

[morts]

Originally Posted by DCramer

Great advice morts. Another option is using online backup services. I use dropbox (not a plug - a great service that i use and love) https://www.getdropbox.com/
it essentually clones a selected portion of your drive online for you to access anytime anywhere and its secure.

Yeah, dropbox, cloudfiles, jungledisk - all good options if you have the upstream bandwidth. Can you imagine backing a photoshoot's worth of RAW files (upwards of 2GB) a time? If it's single JPEGs then it's OK but people will have issues uploading gigabytes of data at a time.

Great suggestion though

[Kn1nJa]

that would definitely be an option for me as I am still stuck with dialup here (yes I live in the middle of nowhere)

so I pretty much just have to rely on hard drives and other assorted media to back up my stuff.

[dakwegmo]

Be cautious when using online backup services. Most are backups only, and not archives, so if you delete a file from your local system, then sync with the backup service it's gone forever.

[morts]

Originally Posted by dakwegmo

Be cautious when using online backup services. Most are backups only, and not archives, so if you delete a file from your local system, then sync with the backup service it's gone forever.

One of the beauties of Robocopy is that my settings make it run as an archiver. It CAN mirror (delete files at destination that no longer exist at source) but I've chosen to not make it do so.

This way, if I screw up, I won't lose files on the server, assuming they'd been backed up.

[dakwegmo]

Originally Posted by morts

One of the beauties of Robocopy is that my settings make it run as an archiver. It CAN mirror (delete files at destination that no longer exist at source) but I've chosen to not make it do so.

This way, if I screw up, I won't lose files on the server, assuming they'd been backed up.

Right, my comment about backups vs. archives was more about the online backup services like dropbox, mozy, carbonite, etc. The last time I checked, the longest any of these services would retain a file after being deleted from your local system is 60 days.

[morts]

Originally Posted by dakwegmo

Right, my comment about backups vs. archives was more about the online backup services like dropbox, mozy, carbonite, etc. The last time I checked, the longest any of these services would retain a file after being deleted from your local system is 60 days.

Yeah...

I guess online backup/archving is OK in the short term, but I wouldn't be comfortable knowing that I could come back to my data and find stuff that's older than 60 days gone...