This is becoming an annual end-of-the-year ritual. I look at the hard disk on my laptop and realize that it’s 95% full, and the next time I download a CF card full of images it will likely tap out.
Digital photography is a major resource hog. I keep probably 95% of the images that I shoot, even if I don’t think right now that they’re worth working on. Often enough, I go back a few months later and decide that an image that I originally dismissed is worth working on. Of course I also need to keep every single family photo that I take, or risk a severely ticked off wife.
A few years ago I decided to switch to a laptop for all my computer needs, and I’m on my second MacBook. But I’m beginning to realize the limitations of that approach, and I think my next computer I’ll probably go the other direction and go back to a desktop Mac. One that I can upgrade extensively.
I don’t shoot nearly as much as a lot of serious photographers, but I do shoot RAW, 21 megapixel files. Once you start editing those files in Photoshop, with layers, it really doesn’t take long to fill up a hard disk.
Around the middle of 2009 I replaced the 250 Gb hard disk that came with my MacBook Pro with a 500 Gb disk. “No problem”, I thought at the time, that will give me plenty of space. Yea, right. My 500 Gb disk now has less than 10 Gb free. Time to do something different.
For the last couple of years we’ve used an old desktop PC stashed in a closet as a backup server for my laptop and Tammie’s. I put a 750 Gb hard drive in it just for data backup, and each day at 3 am it connects to our laptops using SyncBak and it copies over any new files that it finds. About an hour later, it uploads any new files to an account we have on Mozy, providing us with automated off-site storage. Our Mozy account currently has over 500 Gb of stuff on it. It’s a system that works beautifully, and I don’t have to think about it very often. Once or twice a week I connect to the desktop remotely to make sure it’s doing what it’s supposed to, and rarely do I ever have to mess with it.
But it’s not sustainable.
Our big concern is to have off-site backups of photos that are irreplaceable. That means, for the most part, family photos. For me it also means my artistic photos that I consider to be keepers. Ones that I really don’t want to lose. That means that other than the family photos, only about 5% of the RAW files I generate need to be backed up off-site. It also needs to be something that I can do with a minimum amount of manual effort or thought. I’m willing to put a lot of thought and effort into getting the thing working, but once it’s working I don’t want to have to mess with it.
I’ve used Lightroom for the last several years for managing and editing my photos, and it’s an essential piece of how I work with photos. In order to keep disk-space on my laptop manageable, I’ve kept a separate Lightroom catalog for each year, moving last year’s photos and catalog off the laptop to the backup PC when I’m done with them. But at this point I don’t want to have to keep upgrading the hard disk on the server PC, I don’t see the need to back up the vast majority of the RAW files to an off-site location (just the keepers), and my laptop can’t hold a full year’s worth of RAW photos, even if I sacrifice my music collection and numerous programs.
So what am I to do?
Yesterday I bought an external 1.5 Tb drive that I’ve got hooked up to my laptop. I also have a 1 Tb Time Capsule set up to sync my laptop, providing me with a convenient, automatic backup of everything on my laptop. My current plan, is to have all my photos automatically copied to the 1.5 Tb drive, and that will be the main backup for the majority of my photos. I’ll export my keepers to a second Lightroom catalog, and just that catalog and all the associated RAW files will be copied to the server PC, and then to Mozy.
But Lightroom doesn’t make this as easy as it could. I’ll write more about that once I figure out the mechanics of getting this to work.
