Go Team Wood

I read an article recently online written about someone who just lost their house to a fire. Essentially it was a list of the things they wish they had done before the house burned. The majority of the items on the list were suggested to protect things like photos and identification. To say it spooked me is an understatement.

Almost immediately I started looking into online backup services, and suggested to Jeff that we get a safe-deposit box. I did some cursory research into some of the bigger online services but had some concerns. First, our photo library had 25,000 photos before we had the boys. It is well over 35,000 now. Plus videos. Plus a whole lot of paperless archives from last year’s new year’s resolution to scan and digitally archive paper and cut down on clutter. (Only partially successful. I still make piles of paper that are waiting to be scanned. But that is a tale of woe for a different day.) So anyway, we have a lot of data. Second, who is to say the company won’t just disappear one day and that’s that. All eggs. One Basket. Third, our initial backup of everything could take MONTHS. (This is not to say that Online Backup companies are not a good idea and worth the money. I just didn’t find anything that fit our needs.)

Until now our backup strategy was this:

1. Connected USB hard drives that back up hourly and sit, as the article linked above points out, perilously right next to our computers.
2. Buying new memory cards when they fill up. Since the boys were born I stopped deleting memory cards and use those as another backup, a digital negative that is stored in a firebox at home. Memory cards are cheap. Way cheaper than film ever was. For about $15, I can get a card that will hold 500 photos.
3. Finally a we have second external hard drive that just had the photo library backed up to it and stored in a firebox with the memory cards.

Still, we both have technology jobs and have to have difficult conversations about data loss on a daily basis. Professional Data Recovery is insanely expensive. Catastrophic events happen to people. Fires. Floods. Tornadoes. Hopefully they won’t. But why risk it? I am unwilling to even delete blurry photos, so the idea that I wouldn’t do everything in my power to protect all my photos is unthinkable. These are my babies. Growing up. Milestones. Firsts. Teeny-tiny-larva becoming real people before our very eyes. Memories worth protecting.

Monday our family outing was to a local bank to procure a safe-deposit box for our peace of mind. Important papers, IDs, etc. plus our digital backups will be stored there and updated monthly with a pop-up reminder on the calendar.

So this is our new backup strategy:

1. Continue to back up computers hourly to external hard drives.
2. Continue to buy new memory cards as they fill up to maintain a digital negative. Sure, I might have to re-do red-eye or some other needed correction, but that is certainly better than the alternative, which is not having photos at all. Memory cards go into the firebox at home. Then once a month to the bank to the safe-deposit box.
3. Once a month back up all our data to the small external Hard Drive which is now stored off-site in our shiny new safe-deposit box.
4. And since clearly that is not enough… I never found an online backup that I was too enamored with, so I decided to take advantage of my Flickr pro account, which allows for unlimited uploads and storage. So I spent the last two weeks uploading every single photo I have taken since the boys were born, sorted and tagged by month, uploaded a full-resolution and not made public or searchable like the lower-res images we use on Flickr for our website. Jeff was very patient with the slow internet in the weeks it took to upload more than 10,000 images. Monthly upload of the photos taken that month, tagged and sorted. Flickr Pro is $25 a year, which is MUCH cheaper than the online backup services I looked into for the size of my photo library. And they are owned by Yahoo! so hopefully less likely to disappear into the night.
5. When traveling, load the photos onto the laptop, backup to external. Never leave both together. If we go out, we take the hard drive or the laptop and leave the other in the room.

Overkill? Maybe. But you know what? Better safe than sorry.