Some people can lose all their digital work in a few minutes, that’s still very rare. More frequent, your hard drive can crash, any time, without notice. At the end of the day, our digital assets are just becoming so important we cannot live without a clear back-up strategy. For a photographer, it cannot be more important.
The risks
You can’t have everything just in the clouds, that’s too dangerous. Without being paranoiac, services can shut down, someone can steal your password and delete your files, and maybe more important, it is good to keep control on your assets.
That said, the main risk today is still a hard drive crash. So it is very dangerous not to back-up your work on at least another source.
A robbery could make you loosing all your hard drive, but if you have one in another locations.
The constraints
Back-up is boring, sometimes even painful, but always time consuming, and can cost significantly. It is like going to the dentist. No one likes that, but we have to.
Defining the minimum back-up strategy
My “minimum” back-up strategy is to store my digital assets on:
- a desktop (or a laptop) hard drive,
- the cloud thanks to Google drive (or dropbox, or skydrive),
- another hard drive.
Actually, I am also using a second hard drive, not located in my apartment. I am using it only once per year. It is not so redundant as I don’t have any pass word on my desktop (I don’t need one). So I can see a scenario, unlikely of course, where I could lose everything during a robbery. Thanks to this second hard drive not in the same place, that’s look impossible.
Pricing
For less than 100 € you can buy a 1 To Hard drive disk. That’s a very cheap way to be sure your photography won’t disappear.
Clouds services are not that cheap. Google drive will cost you 100 € per year to store 200 Mo, so that’s way more expensive than buying a hard drive! But very flexible, and you can have access to your images from any device, anywhere on Earth. That said, it is not a very cheap way to back-up your images, but it is not only a back-up service, though. Dropbox is even twice as expensive than Google, and for photography back-up, does not bring something else imho. Box can be expensive if you have just a couple of hundreds of megabytes, but is becoming very competitive for storage above 500 Mo.
The bottom line
Keep it simple. But do it.
It has become very affordable to secure all your digital assets, don’t miss this chance… and be sure your data are resilient to most of the threats.