Prompted by a discussion earlier this year when I mentioned to Jacqui that a few years ago I’d lost almost all my photos of our South African trip from 2002, I’d been meaning to get around to restructuring my backup procedures for my existing photo collection, currently comprising 27,500 photos and 225GB of data.

I had local backups, but it was a pretty manual process - copy from card to external HD, then at random intervals back that HD up onto a second external HD. Better than nothing, but still pretty haphazard.

Stage 1 was to get a RAID setup going, so after a bit of research I settled on a 6TB LaCie 2big Thunderbolt2. Configured as RAID 1 gives me 3TB of storage, which is plenty to handle my music and photo libraries. Since it’s Thunderbolt 2 it’s fast enough to handle editing and managing my photo library without needing the catalog on my laptop HD.

Next stage will be to figure out some off-site storage. At this stage I haven’t decided on a suitable option. My regular documents are sorted already so I don’t think I need a continuous backup solution, especially since, apart from the actual image catalog file, the image files won’t change at all. Furthermore, it’s all on an external HD which isn’t necessarily plugged in all the time.

A few hundred GB of FTP storage would suffice, but some of the online backup services are pretty cheap for unlimited storage, so it may be easier to go with one of those. That can be next week’s research project!