My Digital Backup Strategy

I'm an amateur photographer. I've enjoyed taking pictures ever since my grandma gave me a Pentax camera when I was a kid. About two years ago I purchased a Nikon D40 and started using the Flickr photo sharing service so that my wife and I could share our memories with our extended family. Since then I have uploaded over 11,000 high quality images to Flickr.

The whole concept of Flickr was fascinating to me because it's really a dirt cheap high capacity storage solution for media. It's backed by Yahoo! and has been a cinch to work with. I've never worried about the data because they offer paid DVD copies if needed. Also, there are third party solutions that do backups locally.

Recently, something happened that changed my outlook on everything...

I had several hundred photos on a machine that I was selling to a friend. I wanted to move those photos to Flickr but had not gone through and touched them up so I opted to move them to an external hard drive. Everything moved over just fine and I was waiting for a good time to get back into the touch-up editing.

About a month after I sold my old machine I bought a MacBook Pro. The first thing I wanted to test was the TimeMachine backup utility. I already had an external drive and figured I could use it both on the Mac and my wife's PC. Keep in mind that this hard drive contained several hundred photos (and songs) that my wife really wanted. So, with the inexperience of a 5th grader, I slapped the drive on my desk, plugged it into the Mac and was on my way.

I recall a modal dialog that was severed up to me. Something about the drive not formatted for that Mac and that it wanted to reformat it. I heard that it was easy to partition drives on the Mac so that's what I did. Half for the Mac half for the PC. I setup time machine and it worked flawlessly.

Once I had the Mac backed up, I went over to back up the wife's computer and hooked up the hard drive. I decided to check on those files just to make sure they were safe. Nope... Something went horrible wrong. When I formatted the drive, it seems like it formatted the entire drive to be Mac friendly, then partitioned out a windows area. The panic ensued!

I immediately went into damage control mode. How do I recover the files? I search and searched until Google called and asked me to stop hogging their bandwidth. I've tried program after program but I cant get these files back. The strange thing is that the files are there, is some binary crazy encoded format. Each utility can locate the files but they can't read them. I'm screwed!

What I have now is a paper weight. I don't want to use the drive anymore because these precious files are on it. I'm in denial that they are unrecoverable because I haven't taken it to a professional yet for an opinion.

The good news from this experience is that I've become much more data conscious. I've got the mac doing monthly/weekly/daily/hourly backups. My wife's computer is SOL for now. I tried to use Windows Live Sky Drive to copy the files that are important to her to a safe place; what a joke that was. I'm using mozy for now but I don't care too much for it.

The solution...

I just purchased an HP EX487 MediaSmart Home Server. It's a 1.5 TB backup solution for the house. It also centralizes all types of media content that can be shared from anywhere with an internet connection. I really like the iTunes centralization so that my wife and I can hook up our ipods to one library. It also offers integration with Flickr for my photos. I fully intend to load my pics on the mac, edit until my hearts content, move the data to the server and have it automatically load my pictures on flickr.

So, in addition to a backup solution for both my mac and pc's, I now have a file sharing server which means I can load all my HD video (got like 100 GB on my mac right now), audio files and other crap onto this server and keep it off of my machines. You can call Flickr my redundant backup solution for photos. I don't like clutter and I hate slowness and I hope to really clean things up. With my new 20 MPS internet connection I suspect that the backups and file sharing will be very fluid. Did I mention this thing has dual 750 GB 7200 RPM drives?

I also have a separate 1 TB drive that I will use to backup the server. I'm currently investigating online storage that is cheap and integrates seamlessly with the home server so that I'm completely covered for any disasters at the house.

I think I've said too much already. I suspect I'm going to be backing up the in-laws machines now, also my brother,  my grandma and aunt. See where this is going? Maybe this was a bad idea.