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Three Copy Rule

12th November 2012

The typical photographer in the “old” film days probably didn’t take as many photographs as he or she would today thanks to our powerful digital cameras. This made storing printed photographs easier because people would likely place the prints in a box or an album and put it in the closet. A few photographers might have had the foresight to store the corresponding negatives separately and more securely but not much thought was given to storing the prints safely.



“Anyone who has used any type of film camera is likely guilty of storing their photos this way (I’m including myself as well)”

Note that I said easier but that doesn’t mean better. In many ways we’re still using a one box to store all our photos but in this case, that box is our computer. It’s not too hard to imagine how a box of photos could be lost or damaged in those days, but so can a computer today. When that happens, a lifetime of memories is lost because a safe backup system wasn’t used.

We might forgive ourselves in the days of film because we quite frankly probably just didn’t know any better and never thought of backups or extra copies. We’re still facing that same challenge today: why, how and where to store our digital photography files.

Today, however, we have alternatives. One popular method of storing images is to use a portable hard drive (also called external hard drive). These are generally good choices and you can also use multiple external hard drives as your back source. This offers a cheaper way of having your files on multiple backup sources.



“Western Digital has many portable hard drives with capacities of 500GB to 1TB for $100 or less (image courtesy WesternDigital.com). Seagate (www.seagate.com) is another possibility.”

But only using one or more portable hard drives to keep a backup of your images isn’t necessarily effective either. Consider Hurricane Sandy or something like a housefire or burglary. It doesn’t matter how many hard drives you’re using to backup your files, keeping all of them in one location is almost as bad as not having any backup.

Therefore, the best way is to keep a backup that you have at an off-site location. This could be as easy as a portable hard drive that you take to the office or keep at a relative’s house or even a safety deposit box at a bank.

It’s not always practical, of course, to keep a portable hard drive at another location so you might want to consider online storage, also known as cloud storage. This type of storage is quickly becoming a necessity for both businesses and individuals. You can select from several reliable sites that are available. These sites have different plans depending on the amount of storage but you can generally expect to pay a few dollars a month for 20 to 30 GB of storage space. A few may even have a small amount of storage available at no charge so you can get an idea of what the online storage is all about.

I’m not recommending one over another but the following should give you a good idea of what is available:

Box.com

Carbonite

DropBox

JustCloud

Live Drive

Mozy

My PC Backup

OpenDrive

Sugar Sync

YouSendIt

Don’t, however, rely entirely on the cloud backups. Instead use the 3 Copy Rule:

1. Main source location (I’m referring to your computer here, NOT the memory card still in the camera!)
2. Use a portable hard drive for daily backups or quick backups
3. Use the cloud backups for your offsite backup



“The Three Copy Rule is simple to follow yet it seems like we don’t regularly follow it.”

In other words, backup redundancy is the best plan to avoid disaster.

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