{"id":41593,"date":"2026-05-04T06:12:22","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T10:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=41593"},"modified":"2026-05-02T22:12:36","modified_gmt":"2026-05-03T02:12:36","slug":"tip-jar-18-back-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2026\/05\/tip-jar-18-back-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Tip Jar 18: Back up!"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’re pursuing anything even remotely ‘serious,’ much less as a profession or sideline income, some (a lot) of what you do won’t be the actual pursuit, but all of the supporting tasks that are required, and for photographers, one of those is ensuring that you always have backups of your work<\/strong>. Hard drives fail, sometimes without warning, and of course accidents and viruses happen, so this should be a regularly-scheduled thing. Here’s a bit of my routine, and why I’m doing it this way.<\/p>\n

First off, there are four<\/em> hard drives in my system, obviously not a laptop, though one of them is only the solid-state drive with the operating system on it (Ubuntu Studio.) One is the work drive, and two are for backups and archival stuff (and 3D printing files.) Not only that, but I maintain an additional, external hard drive with backups as well, mostly because anything that hits system-wide won’t affect that one – this would primarily be viruses, but I’ve also seen a corrupt power source affect the boot sector of all drives on the system. It’s often recommended that external backups be maintained off-site, meaning not at home, in the event of a fire or flood or whatever – I’m not presently doing this, partially because I haven’t found the way to make it work well enough.<\/p>\n

What about cloud storage?<\/strong> Yeah, no, or more specifically, [vehement obscenity of your choice] no. Cloud storage is simply another computer, so the same as an external hard drive, but one that you have no idea where it is or who has access to it, how often it’s backed up and how legitimate or even solvent the business is. It is, literally<\/em>, safer to bury your hard drive in an ammo can in the woods than place that kind of faith in any businesses today. Feel free to use cloud storage if you’re adventurous, but read all the fine print first, especially about their access, security, and liability, and even then, should they simply disappear, good luck pursuing that in any legal or useful manner.<\/p>\n

How often?<\/strong> Depends on your volume, really, and how much stuff you can stand to lose if a failure occurs. Weekly, monthly, bi-annually, whatever you’re comfortable with, but a schedule is recommended.<\/p>\n

Now, this has a little of the ‘do as I say, not as I do,’ aspect to it, since my image backup is not scheduled or routine, but based off of whenever I finish a major sorting job – and it’s usually major since I don’t sort as I go, which I probably should. So, the database<\/em> for the blog is weekly, downloaded and compressed, because it’s always just a few minutes to do and takes place on a schedule, the same time that I check out the stats and look at the spam folders on the remote server.<\/p>\n

[I also maintain local files of the posts, both published and in draft form, and a folder of the uploaded images, and once a month these are compared for accuracy. It’s been this way ever since a previous hosting service wiped the site and I had to rebuild from backups – which run back three months now, since I’ve also<\/em> found that some updated software or plugins have issues that are not immediately apparent.]<\/p>\n

Routinely, however, the images in my Sort folders are backed up to one of the other local hard drives, even though they will eventually all leave the Sort folders to the Catalog folders instead, such as Arthropods, Mammals, and so on. This is because, every once in a while during sorting or picking one to edit for use, I delete it accidentally. Yes, I know there are ‘Recycle Bins’ on the computer for everything deleted, and I routinely do not<\/em> use them, the reasons being, they don’t actually clear any space until they’re emptied, and anyone can have access to the contents before this happens, which is shitass security for anything financial or private. So I do my own ‘Recycle Bin’ only for the Sort folder, and delete those when they hit a few weeks old.<\/p>\n

\"screenshot
Backup programs.<\/strong> I’ve been using FreeFileSync<\/a> for several years now, and it works superbly. Simply pick the folders you want to compare, the source on your workhorse drive and the backup elsewhere, and click ‘Compare.’ The program selects all of the new or changed files, and allows you multiple backup options like Mirroring (make these folders identical) or Update (add in the new stuff, but don’t delete anything.) Pretty flawless, and quick as well. Whatever you use, make sure that you understand what it’s doing and keep a close eye on the projected changes before approving them – it can be too easy to wipe out something that you want to keep.<\/p>\n

[The Linux operating system, by the way, is maintained weekly by Timeshift, which has one notable flaw:<\/strong> it cannot be specifically scheduled, but decides on its own when to do a weekly\/whatever backup, and will tie up a lot of resources when it does. As yet, I have not done a restoration except when I was first installing Ubuntu Studio, so I can’t vouch for how effective it is.]<\/p>\n

At the same time that I do the image folders backup, I also do the website, video projects, and documents folders as well, and usually backup the Bookmarks\/Links file from the web browsers so I have a current list of saved links, which is disturbingly large.<\/p>\n

Heed the warning signs.<\/strong> If your computer stalls more than occasionally, if you get any warnings on boot that a drive cannot be accessed, if you find corrupt files when reviewing images in your image\/thumbnail viewer, back up immediately. Also do backups before any major changes, like upgrading operating systems or moving drives around.<\/p>\n

Is it necessary?<\/strong> Enough people telling you to do this should be reason enough, but also, think how bad you’ll be kicking yourself if\/when the failure does occur and you’ve lost irreplaceable images or work. We are, for reasons unknown, a gambling species, and we like to bet on events not happening if it’s the slightest bit inconvenient to be prepared for them – a bet with trivial payoff and significant losses. Recognize how stupid this really is.<\/p>\n

As a personal account, I’ve only had one drive fail when I was unprepared, and that was at the worst possible time:<\/strong> when I was migrating to a new computer and had my digital images solely on one hard drive, with only a few of them backed up to CD-ROMs (this occurred 22 years ago, so hush.) A significant number of images taken in Florida were lost, trapped on a drive that became inaccessible. I actually still have it, having tried several different tricks to get into it, and it awaits a time when I’m willing to dismantle it and switch read\/write heads, which is not likely to be the problem but my last resort. Data recovery services are available that can read raw data from a hard drive, by dismantling it and installing the media in a specialty unit – and they charge out the ass for such things.<\/p>\n

\"BackupThat said, I’ve had several failures which turned out to be the SATA ports on the motherboard going bad while the drive was still good, and have used my Sort backup to restore images an unknown number of times (a dozen or so?) I have had warning signs from drives and switched over, one of which did indeed fail soon afterward and is now inaccessible even from an external drive dock – nothing lost, since I acted quickly. Worth noting is that I also learned ages ago how to avoid viruses, of which Linux is largely resistant to in the first place;<\/strong> a friend of mine has learned no such thing, and has been infected to the point of reformatting drives at least three times (good rule to follow:<\/strong> if it seems too good to be true, it is – don’t click<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Another little tip that may be useful. I discovered after much trial and error that having this many drives is a load on the power source, and even if it has enough SATA power connections, this doesn’t necessarily mean it can provide adequate power to all of them simultaneously. Also, this might simply have been, instead, individual power leads going bad, but it’s the same symptoms as a hard drive going bad, so don’t assume anything. Switching drives and power leads can help pinpoint this, but be warned;<\/strong> you’re also risking a power warble affecting the boot sector of a drive and rendering it inaccessible.<\/p>\n

So, if you’re not doing backups routinely, change that right now. Don’t lose work that you can easily maintain with some good habits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’re pursuing anything even remotely ‘serious,’ much less as a profession or sideline income, some (a lot) of what you do won’t be the actual pursuit, but all of the supporting tasks that are required, and for photographers, one of those is ensuring that you always have backups of your work. Hard drives fail, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11],"tags":[2706,8669,3956,8476,3812,8672,8670,8673,8671],"class_list":["post-41593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo","category-reference","tag-always-run-backups","tag-backups","tag-corrupt-files","tag-cover-your-ass","tag-failure","tag-freefilesync","tag-hard-drive","tag-how-much-can-you-lose","tag-viruses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41593"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41614,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41593\/revisions\/41614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}