Safeguard Your Photographs – The Benefits Of Online Backup
Post Excerpt:
Protect your photography business and your precious photographs from accidental loss – back them up. Use DVDs, hard drives or the new methods of online storage.
There’s one thing that every file on your computer has in common – they can ALL be lost, and they will ALL face the ultimate demise of deletion one day…
Okay, I’ll put up my hand first and say that, yes, I’ve accidentally deleted files from my computer before now, and I’ve had hard drives bite the dust. It can happen to all of us, and probably will, at some point!
To protect ourselves against accidental loss, if we’re smart, we backup our files (especially those all-important photos) to DVDs, external hard drives, RAID disks or even tapes.
All of these are great ways to protect our precious data, but they’re all subject to possible degradation over time. DVDs can become unusable after only a year or two, external hard drives fail (far more often than internal ones). Not to mention that any of these can get lost, stolen, destroyed in a fire or flood etc…
This is one reason why online storage is gaining ground these days. Now that most people have access to relatively fast internet connections, it’s not too much of an inconvenience to upload your files to a server where you know that it will be taken care of, and can also be backed up regularly by the data center.
What Are The Choices For Online Storage?
When it comes to online storage for your photography business, there are two basic options:
- Specialized online data backup services (Mozy, iDrive, Carbonite)
- Special areas of your own website as backup locations
Online Backup Services
If you want the convenience of automated backups and encrypted storage then an online backup service might be the best option for you. Setup is easy, you don’t have to manually back up your files most of the time, and your files are easy to retrieve if you need them. The service does have a low cost, starting around $55 per year, depending on how much space you need. Some companies charge more for business use than home use, so make sure you read the fine print and understand what your getting.
The only downside I can see to using this type of service is if the company were to go out of business. In that situation, you may find that you can no longer access your data. I would also avoid using any service whose data centers are not in your own country.
DIY Storage
If you’re comfortable with using FTP and/or manage your own photography website, you could also use a dedicated sub-domain on your own website to store your files. From a security standpoint, you can set the sub-domain to redirect back to your main website in the event someone finds it, so your files should be fairly safe from theft.. It’s also possible to password-protect access to specific folders. Having said that, I might think twice about storing financial or other sensitive data in this way, but I have no problem with storing photos, word documents or other non-personal information.
The beauty of using your own website is that it doesn’t cost anything additional to what you might already be paying for the hosting. Many hosting plans come with a lot more bandwidth and storage space than a single website can take up, so why not make use of the remaining space by storing your photographs? For example, my hosting plan includes 500GB per month of traffic and 50GB of space – way more than I can use for the website alone.
All you need to get started is to set up a separate area of the website (preferably a new sub-domain, but it could be a protected folder) and a suitable FTP program (for example, FileZilla).
Conclusion
Whichever option you choose for backing up your files, one thing’s clear – you need to back them up somehow. Don’t leave it to chance that everything will be fine without a backup. It might seem like a chore and an overhead now, but you’ll be thanking yourself for it when you need to recover something!
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