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Editor's note -- In part one of this two-part series covering strategies for protecting your photos, Josh Anon discusses some basic archiving concepts and then delves into hard drive options, including RAID configurations. There's lots of food for thought here as you devise your strategy for storing images.
Stop and think for a minute. How many images do you have in your photo library? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? Consider the work required to make each image (to say nothing of the post-processing work, including keywording); each image is unique and irreplaceable.
Now what would happen if there were a fire at your home or office? The drives containing your images would melt and, unless you followed good backup practices, all your hard work would be destroyed. It seems obvious that we should all backup our files, and Aperture can help make backup part of your workflow, even beyond the built-in vault tool.
In this article, I'll explore general ideas behind backup strategies, discuss different backup formats and how to use Aperture with each, and demonstrate a sample workflow.
As reliable as computers are, sometimes parts just break. Or something happens that damages your laptop. Or someone breaks in and steals your computer. Or a freak solar storm causes an electromagnetic pulse that wipes your hard drives. The list of things that can go wrong goes on and on, and you can never really be 100 percent safe. Thinking about that list and how to protect against the different potential problems will help you develop good backup strategies that allow you to keep your images reasonably safe.
The absolutely simplest form of backup is just to make a second copy of your files--perhaps automatically--on a second hard drive via an Automator script when you import images. For such an Automator script, see http://automator.us/aperture/. I'll discuss more ways to get your images onto another drive in a bit, but for now, the next question is: what should you do with that second copy?
Ideally, you should keep that second copy in a different physical location so that if something bad happens to your primary copy, the second copy will be safe. Keeping one copy at home and another at the office/studio is an easy way to accomplish this. But if your office is close to your home and you're worried about big disasters (such as an earthquake), consider sending an additional copy to someone in another city.
This Automator action allows you to make a second copy of your images on import.
As time passes, it's possible that the quality of your second copy will begin to degrade. For example, if your second copy was a burned DVD on a very cheap disc that you stored in a sunny area, it's possible the disc will go bad within a year. Periodically verifying and upgrading backups is critical. Using high-quality drives or discs is a great way to help ameliorate this issue, but even archival-grade discs can go bad.
Furthermore, it's often good to have more than one backup stored in two or more formats, such as on a hard drive and on a DVD-R disc. Doing so increases the odds that if something bad happens to your primary copy, at least one of your backups will be safe. You might be tempted to say, "well, I'll just buy two hard drives and make two copies." But again, what if some natural event happens that erases the hard drives? Also, sometimes manufacturers have bad runs of the same drives (or discs, or tapes, etc.), and it's conceivable that both copies could just go bad at around the same time. Having two different formats reduces the likelihood of having both copies go bad at the same time. If you really prefer to have two identical formats, buy your drives or discs from different manufacturers or at slightly different times; this decreases the likelihood that you'll have troubles with any manufacturing defects.
What all of this comes down to is that you should have at least one extra copy of your projects and images that you keep up to date (located somewhere other than right beside your main computer) and you should periodically make sure the backup is still valid. That's a tall task! Let's look at how Aperture can help achieve this goal.
It should come as no surprise that the easiest way to use Aperture to create a backup is by using a hard drive of some sort. For single hard drives, I'm partial to the G-Technology G-DRIVEs due to their fast performance, reliability, and Firewire connections. Another great (and often overlooked) hard drive for backup on the go is an iPod! Check "Enable Disk Use" in iTunes and the iPod will appear as a hard drive (make sure to eject the disk before removing it from the computer). With the new iPods holding as much as 160GB, there's plenty of space for your music, videos, and RAW files.
However, for most hard-drive based backups, I would definitely recommend a RAID array. A RAID array consists of two or more disks joined together that appear as one drive to the computer and provide a bit of data protection and/or a performance boost. The simplest form of RAID for our purposes is RAID 1. In this type of RAID array, two or more drives are simply mirrored together (this also starts you on the path of automatically having more than one backup copy of your work). When you copy a file to the drive on the computer, it's physically written to both drives. The downside to RAID 1 is that there's no error-correction, and your total capacity is limited to the size of the smallest disk in the array. There's another, safer, form of RAID called RAID 5, which requires at least three disks. RAID 5 stores extra information that lets you recover data if one drive fails.
There are also two categories of RAID arrays: hardware and software. Examples of hardware RAID include G-Technologies' G-SAFE RAID 1 unit and Kano Technologies' SureVault RAID 1 or RAID 5 units. Both of these consist of a box that sits on your desk and plugs into your computer via Firewire or USB, just like a normal external hard drive. No special setup is required. Just plug it in and you'll automatically have a RAID drive. Plus, if you plug the drives into another computer, the other computer will see the same RAID setup.
Software RAID is great for local, working storage but not very useful as a general backup mechanism. Here, by using Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities), you can tell Mac OS X to make two or more drives appear as a RAID 1 array. Unfortunately, if you connect those drives to another computer, the second computer won't treat the drives as part of a RAID array. For this reason, software RAID with external drives isn't an ideal solution.
However, what I would highly recommend to anyone in the market for a new computer is to buy a Mac Pro and fill drive bays one and two with identical, large hard drives. Then, before you start setting up the computer, boot from an external drive, follow the instructions at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106594 to turn your two drives into a mirrored RAID array, and then reinstall Mac OS X.
By taking this route, you will always make a backup copy of your work as soon as you hit save. Unfortunately, there is no RAID 5 option, and since this is software RAID, it depends on the software continuing to work properly to run the RAID properly.
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