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I like to make photos and I like to shoot them in RAW and I don’t like to delete any and I have 12MP Canon XSi. And most important thing – I want to keep them safe.

The very first idea was to burn them to DVD… This idea sucks from the very beginning. My workflow assumes that I process RAW photos in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and I want to keep everything safe. First obvious solution is to back them up on other hard drive. Preferably external hard drive, and because my mother always said “when the house is in fire you have to save the only one thing – photos – the rest you can build or buy again” this should be small external drive you be able to put in your firesafe. So I’ve got my Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive. I’m still using it – once a month I make complete backup of my Lightroom catalog and put this HDD back to firesafe. It has couple of drawbacks – I should remember to make those backups and in case of disaster I will lose data for this month.

So I start to research online backup solutions. When you’re decide to do online backup – first of all open your favorite calculator application and do some math. For example – I have 200Gb of data today that need to be backed up and I have cable with upload speed 768kbit/s (about 60kB/s) – 200*1024*1024/60 = 3495253 seconds / 86400 = 40 days of continous upload on theoretical limit of you link. Remember that to be able to browse internet with some comfort you need at least 10-20kB/s available upload bandwidth. So this will be not 40, but 60 days to make an full upload. And sh!t happens so add extra month just in case. And remember that some of your data is not static and it should be updated. I’ve tried to use online backup on cable with 768kbit/s of upload and on FiOS 5Mbit/s of upload and I can tell you for sure that for large chunks of information (like 250Gb of 12Mb RAW photos) online will work only on FiOS.

There are 3 online backup services that provide unlimited storage for almost the same price – $4.50/month – Mozy, Carbonite and Crash Plan. All of them have trial version of free version so you can download and play with it for some time. After couple of days of researching I’ve picked Mozy – $4.50/month/PC. I need to back up single computer (for other PCs in hosuehold 2Gb of free account is more than enough) and I like their software the best. It works really well (on FiOS). Last week I’ve restored about 12Gb of data without any problems. Did I mention that Mozy keeps versions? I’ve tried to restore earlier versions of my Lightroom catalog (I accidentally lost all color marks of my photos and this really critical for me) – no problems at all. Fast and easy.

I’ve found plenty of negative reviews of Mozy, but all of them are old and I didn’t find any dated, for example, this year.

So if you are looking for fully automated online backup solution – I recommend Mozy.

Tags: backup, computer, photo, sysadmin

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 11:39 am and is filed under default. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.