A Backup Strategy for a Photographer & Cameraman

A question that finds a lot of discussion in the forums as much as in the Real World(tm) is “how to backup terabytes of photos and video rushes?”. It may only appear to be a simple question with a simple answer, however if your livelihood depends on recovering footage shot two years ago but the hard drive or DVD you put it on died, you are stuffed and the producer or editor will think twice before booking you again! So what’s an efficient, cost effective and straight-forward enough backup strategy then?

RAW photos and uncompressed HD video rushes are big! A project I filmed recently over two days weighs in with just over 50GB of HD1080i footage recorded by my Sony EX3 XDCAM. My Lightroom catalog is already 57.3GB of RAW photos although I only started shooting professionally sometime in the second quarter this year. Not hard to imagine how large a collection of raw material I will have collected by the end of the year!

The olden days

Before, I shot on DV tape or took photos saved as JPG, producing a relatively small amount of data that needed backing up. In all cases I simply made sure the original tapes were stored safely and copied the final project with associated footage to DVD and an external hard drive. So far this has worked pretty well and with the advent of “cloud” data storage (Amazon S3, Dropbox, SugarSync to name but three), I also had a neat way to backup, version and share files while keeping them in-sync across multiple computers.

Using this system with hundreds of Gigabytes of files will make you poor very quickly as well as max out your internet connection for long periods. Even when you are on fibre optic cable pushing 2MBit/s upload speeds, you can expect your 50GB of newly acquired data to take a while to upload to the notoriously slow servers of most cloud storage providers.

Backing-up to DVD results in not much more joy as you will need DVD-DL disks offering a measly 8GB of space and therefore a lot of disks. Hard drives are cheap but if you are using a single external USB2 drive for backups then you are not much safer. USB2 is also excruciatingly slow and even with Firewire 800 you are looking at not much better transfer times.

Things that do not work well

Time for a quick summary to see what’s not working so far:

• External USB or Firewire hard drives
  Because it’s slow as well as unsafe to store data on a single (cheap) hard drive.
• DVD disks
  Too many disks required to backup to. Professional grade archive quality disks are expensive too!
• Cloud storage providers
  Too slow and too expensive for huge amounts of data required to be stored!

Find out how I do it on the next page… .