I recently spent a good amount of time clearing about 60GB of images from my hard drive. When I originally mentioned this on a flickr post awhile back I got a lot of comments that went something like “Hard drives are cheap, I just buy another drive when I run out of space”. Well, in fact hard drives are pretty cheap these days, but that’s not the reason I was clearing out images. I don’t see the point in backing up stuff that I would never use.
I have a pretty solid file server at home actually, with plenty of space. Being in the IT field, I see hard drives crash all the time, and it’s never a matter of “IF” your hard drive will fail, but “WHEN” it will fail, so multiple copies of your images are really important. Photographs of your kids when they were growing up, for example, can never be replaced. It’s also very important to have copies of your files at more than one location just in case something happens to that location.
A good example of this is a friend of mine that lives in Oakland, CA; he recently went on a 5 day vacation to Yosemite, only to return to find that his home was broken into, and all of his computers in the house were stolen. Even though he had multiple copies of his photos on different computers, he lost all of the photos of his children growing up. I thought it would be good to mention my basic solution to this problem, and while it may not be the perfect solution, it works pretty well for me.
First of all, when I get home from shooting, I upload my images to my desktop, renaming them at the same time. I then use a free program called SyncBack to syncronize the images over to my file server to ensure that I immediatly have 2 copies of my files. I also have syncback configured to nightly synchronize the 2 drives. This ensures that the photos I work on during the day, also get copied over that night in case of a drive failure.
I also use a directory structure that makes it very easy to backup only may latest images. My directory structure goes something like this:
- Photos (Top Directory)
- Year (e.g. 2006)
- Month (01, 02, 03…)
- Shoot With date in the folder name (MountHood_011806)
- Images with date in the filename (MountHood_011806.NEF)
I realize that this is a very personal thing, and there’s probably a better way to do it, but this is how I do it and it works for me. It makes it very easy for me to find the original folder of images from a single filename if I need to get to the original quickly at a later time. This also allows me to easily plugin my USB drive and backup 1 months worth of images at a time for example. This is actually what I do; when a new month starts, I back up the previous month to my USB drive, and take it to work and put it in my desk. This is an easy way to have an “offsite” copy of my images. This is fine, but it’s time consuming if you want to always have your latest images offsite, and I only do it once a month because it’s not an automated thing.
Being a Systems Administrator, I love automation. If I have to do something manually more than a few times, I generally like to just write a script or figure out another way that will accomplish the task automatically. This is where the online backups come into play. 
With the super fast internet speeds these days, and the cheap online backup solutions available, I recommend anybody that’s serious about backing up their files subscribe to one of these solutions. It will take awhile to initially backup your images depending on how many you have, but once that’s done, these solutions just magically backup your images very shortly after you upload them. I am currently using one called BackBlaze, and it works fine for me. It runs me a whopping $5 per month. There are others out there too, and I know of a couple of people that are very happy with Mozy.
I hope this short article helps a few people save some images in the future, and feel free to comment with questions or suggestions!
Great Food for thought. Most of us think about backing up our work after we have already had a crash. Thanks!
First of all, congratulations for your works and for the website, this is really a good one, I found it because I saw the link in a picture’s description when I left my comment.
The backup is really important also for me, I always have the “work copy” in my computer, then a copy in an external hard drive, then I burn DVDs for the amount of 4Gb (2 copies) and I keep each copy in a different place (not in the same house). For me it’s working fine.
Again, comgratulations and keep doin’ this great work!
Fabrizio
THANK YOU JESSE, THIS IS FABULOUS INFORMATION…SO KIND OF YOU TO SHARE IT!
MOST GRATEFULLY,
DONNA LEE
I laughed when i saw this. I have just spent the last 3 days going through over 50,000 images trying to sort out the mess Lightroom made when i used it to try and move duplicates to another folder so i could delete them (cant find an app that will match duplicates and move them so i can review them first, they all want to match and delete and usually one image at a time). I ended up with all my images in one folder and most of the files renamed B00001. B00002…..etc after deleting over 100gb of dupes and unneeded images, At the moment i am trying to sort a file structure and backup strategy which will be easy for me to follow. I remember seeing something like your recommendations for folder, date and file name in a Lightroom 3 workflow article abut lost track of it, so thanks for refreshing my memory.
Clive – the best way to avoid the duplicates is to never import your images with the default filenames that the camera gives them. That’s the number one piece of advice I could give anyone starting out with their file management. Glad the article was useful for you.
Excellent article. I tend to clean up my drives often as well for the same reason of not wanting to store and sift through a ton of images I’ll never use.
Also, the naming convention you mentioned is similar to what I like to use that I’ve found works very well for cataloging thousands of images as the years go by. Here’s an example.
/2011/01 January/110130 Shoot Description/110130 Shoot Description 001.nef
This method lists everything chronologically by date descending. The date in the folder and file names is formatted YYMMDD.
I can also look at a file name out of the folder context – like “110715 Portland Trip 135.jpg” – and know exactly where it fits in my file structure.
Well said mate.