rdeloe Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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These days there's really no excuse for losing data because there are so many good options. If you don't want to go the cloud route, for a modest investment, and with some good backup discipline, you can put together a good system. As others have mentioned, generations and versions are crucial.
For what it's worth, here's what I do in my Windows environment:
* SyncBackPro is my backup software. It's reliable and very flexible.
* I work off an internal drive (images, Lightroom catalogues)
* A second internal drive is my main backup drive. It mirrors my main drive, but keeps 3 versions of any files that have changed, for 365 days. I trigger backups manually, but I could easily set it up to automatically backup on changes.
* I mirror my main internal backup drive to two bare hard drives that rotate between on-site and off-site locations. They also have versions as above.
* I also mirror my main internal backup drive to a Stardock RAID enclosure (set to RAID 1 mirroring). It's too big to transport so it stays at my home office.
* Finally, I have lots of space on my home server so I mirror to that too.
This setup ticks the "multiple copies, multiple versions" box. It's scalable as the size of what I need to backup grows, and it's economical because I always seem to have bare hard drives lying around as I upgrade systems. The weakness is the off-site backups, which are always going to be a bit out of date (at minimum by a day, and sometimes by a week).
It works for me because photography is my avocation rather than my primary vocation. If I made more of my income from my photography, I'd definitely be using a system like the one dgdg described on page 1 of this thread!
For some context, when I worked with film, I had no backups. If the binder containing my negatives was lost or damaged, or if I damaged a negative, that was the end of that. So this is multiple orders of magnitude more backups than I "grew up with" (photographically speaking).
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