MICHAELSCHULZ|PHOTOGRAPHY

So two days ago my working drive died. Too bad. And not a big deal thanks to a pretty paranoid backup strategy for all my data. Since this is something most people don’t seem to think about on a regular basis I thought I share my setup which is a) pretty simple and b) affordable (as compared to loosing all your images)

Step 1) I work off of a 1TB external FW800 drive that’s connected to my MacBook Pro. All my working files are on this drive (and this is the one which failed).

Step 2) Every night the local 1TB drive is synced over the network (rsync is your friend here) onto another 1TB drive connected to a Linux based file server.

Step 3) After that sync the drive attached to the server is then synced to another drive attached to the file server (again via rsync) to protect against any local failures in my office.

So far up to two drives can fail without me loosing any data older than a day

Step 4) Every week I sync the working drive to another 1TB drive which is stored off site. So even if the house burns down, somebody breaks in and steals all my drives, I still have all my data from at least a week before the disaster.

Step 5) In addition to the offsite drive I also keep all final images on a share in the cloud using Amazon’s S3 service and the wonderful JungleDisk (www.jungledisk.com) tool. This allows me to not only have two off site copies of my data but also world wide access to at least documents and final images.

So all in all, three drives can fail or get stolen or get lost in a disaster before I really need to start worrying about what to do. Is this all worth it? Absolutely. With the cost of hard disks going down every day it would be the wrong end to save. After all, this is my work that I can’t easily replace. A hard drive can be replaced for as little as $149.

Please feel free to comment on what your backup solution looks like.

From the website:

PhotoCamp Houston is an UNconference where you are not only the audience, but you can also give a presentation on topics you and others care about with fervor! It is designed for people to share and learn in an open environment for the Houston, Texas metroplex. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

This sounds like a great idea and I’m absolutely looking forward to be there and share the passion of photography
and also learn and hopefully also give some tips to others.

Go to the website to find out more and sign up. The date is January 24, 2009 and it’ll be held in the Houston Technology Center

After hours, days, weeks no decades of hard work, sleepless nights and a gazillion cases of
energy drinks I finally can announce the new version of my website.

Well ok .. actually it didn’t take that long thanks to the folks at Issuu.
Go check it out and play around with the free version. Initially created to provide a way to create and
distribute online magazines, it also makes for a perfect tool for an online portfolio. Simply create your
portfolio in Pages, Word, OpenOffice.org or , export as PDF and upload it. They
give you a simple link to embed it into your website and voila you got yourself an easy way to maintain
you presence on the Internet.