Some of us get into photography because we want to preserve memories. Others, because there’s this gadget lust. Still others are into the art of it. Regardless of the reason, sooner or later, there will be megabyte upon megabyte of picture files filling up gigabyte upon gigabyte of hard drive space. It’s just the nature of the beast now and it’s a good thing.

Can you imagine keeping folder upon folder of printed photos or boxes of different sizes just to preserve your memories? Not too long ago, that’s what people did and there were so many photo albums that littered almost every person’s living room. What about the negatives? These things often got misplaced or, worse, they got damaged due to mishandling. It was almost always amusing how so many people took such great care of their prints but not their negs. If you lose the print, you still can easily get a new print as long as you have the negs. Sigh.

Backing things up

That was then and this is now. Almost all photo enthusiasts and professionals today use digital technology and this has led to an abundance of storage devices and methods that can be used to store data. It’s actually funny but some of the best practices in the age of the PC-XT, PC-AT, DOS, Wordstar, Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase IV (oh, many of us will remember these and are dated by them) are still pretty much valid up to now.

Perhaps one of the most important ideas then and now is backing things up. The author of a book about keeping one’s data safe was rather straight to the point about why one should back things up: If you don’t back up your data, you deserve to lose it. Or something like that.

He’s actually right especially in this day and age. People who still don’t make use or know about the auto save feature of programs like Microsoft Word are courting danger. Oh, for those of you who do know about it, just a question: Do you leave it at its default setting of saving data every 10 minutes? I don’t. All word processors I use default to saving data every minute. Why? It’s simple. Accidents can happen any time and when you write stuff and you write fast, so much is really lost in a minute. If your system crashes for some reason and you’re writing at a fast clip and you don’t write your drafts on paper anymore, there’s really so much that you lose if things just shut down even if your computer saves every minute. Can you imagine how much you do lose if you only save every 10 minutes?

Okay, that’s a word processor thing. How does it apply to photographic data? Considering how cheap it is to buy hard drives now, here’s the first suggestion: Buy big hard drives and buy at least two if you’re just starting out. How big? It depends on what you think is safer. Some argue that it’s best to just have one big hard drive (a terabyte or bigger) as your main archive/storage device while others say it’s best to have many smaller devices (maybe 250 or 320 gigabytes each). The rationale for the latter is understandable: If one hard drive fails, you lose the photos in that hard drive but not the others.

Some people don’t really shoot that much and there’s really nothing wrong about keeping the main files in the computer’s main data drive. (Note: The usual advice for desktop users is to have a boot drive and a separate data drive so that if the boot drive crashes due to stuff like hardware failure or viruses, your data drive, and, therefore, the data may survive.) The best thing to do though is to keep a backup drive with all your data in it. You may want to organize stuff according to year and then according to month or do what Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture do and arrange everything according to events. For most people, this is the way to go.

What happens when a hard drive fails? If the thing is within the warranty period, you get a new hard drive. What about the data? Well, the hard drive manufacturer doesn’t and can’t really cover that area. It’s really up to you if you wanna risk this.

The minimum

Some people may find this a bit much but when it’s your memories or your profession that’s in question, it’s really such a little thing and the least you should do.

So for starters, assuming you’re using a Windows machine, be it XP, Vista (why would you?) or 7, there’s the first real line of defense – have a boot drive and a data drive. You can get by with the smallest capacity hard drive for a boot drive (80 gigabytes?) and store all your programs and maybe even your music files there. If that crashes, you just reinstall everything (argh!). It’s a pain but what’s really important is your data.

Next, get yourself another data drive be it an internal hard drive or an external one and make it the same size (at least) as your main data drive. This is where the commitment to keeping your files safe is first expressed. We did mention some time ago that getting into photography means jumping into a proverbial bottomless pit. Some think it’s about the camera, lenses, flash units, tripods, bags, and doodads. Some forget that with all this digital stuff, the computer is another thing they should include in their budgets.