In 2006 I burned two months worth of photos to disc in a photo lab in Bangkok. It was a modern shop with technology that probably outstrips what I would have found at most places in North America. When I returned home, I put the discs in a safe place and downloaded all the images from memory cards to computer. I resized the better images to share online or print out, and largely forgot about them.

A year later, someone thought it would be a good idea to kick down my apartment door and steal my computer. So many of my photos and writings from the last few years were gone, and I was left with a pile of backup discs in varying conditions. Little of my writing survived, and only one of the two discs from my months in Thailand was readable by my new computer. I tried it on my computer at work, I tried it on my brother’s professional photo editing system, I even sent it home with a few friends to see if they could rescue the data, but the disc remained unreadable. While I’m sure I could have paid a data recovery expert to try to pull the photos off for me, I was so frustrated that I decided to just leave it.

These days I shoot a 12.3 megapixel digital SLR (as opposed to the 2 MP point and shoot I had in Thailand) and I’ve learned that my backup solutions needed to scale with the upgrade. If you’re creating anything of value on your computer, what steps are you taking to ensure that you don’t lose it for good if everything goes down?

The Rule of Three
Always keep your important items in 3 different locations. This is as important as your documents are to you. It’s highly recommended that at least one of the backup locations is not in the same room or building as the other two. Do you live in an apartment or condo with a sprinkler system? Ever looked around at your electronics and realized how much would disappear if the apartment down the hall was on fire and your sprinklers went off?

Backing Up Your Writing
The nice thing about backing up text documents is the relatively small amount of space they take up.

• Site 1: Your Hard Drive. Easy, this is where your work already lives.
• Site 2: An External Drive. 4 GB thumb drives are incredibly cheap these days, but to store thousands of pages of text documents, you only need 1 GB. For larger backup solutions, I love my WD My Passport Essential 500 GB drive so much that I took it to South America for 5 weeks to back up my photos. Use the built in software on your computer (I use Time Machine on my Mac), incremental back up software (I use Carbon Copy Cloner), or just drag and copy files from one drive to the next.
• Site 3: On the Interwebs. This is the second easiest method. Check out the online backup tools like Dropbox, Mozy, or something you’ve had recommended. After about ten minutes of set up and initial sync, I had all of my writing stored in the Dropbox folder on my hard drive. Everything placed in this folder is mirrored on the Dropbox website, and accessible through a login. I also have Dropbox installed on my netbook, and it automatically updates to the latest versions of my writing when it’s able to connect to the Dropbox server. With the 2 GB of storage on a free account, my writing is safe in the event of a physical calamity, easy to access if I’m not at my own computer, and synced across multiple computers as long as I have internet access. What’s not to like?

• Alternative to Online Storage. Okay, it’s 2010, but not everyone has daily internet access. What else can you do? Buy a second flash drive and leave it at the office. Bring it home once a week to do a backup, and return it to your office the next day. Don’t work in an office? Swap with a friend every week. You store their weekly backup, and they store yours. No friends? Put your drive in a plastic bag or watertight container and bury it in the woods. Dig it up every week to copy your data, and while you’re digging maybe think about, you know, getting out and meeting people.

Backing Up Your Photos While Travelling
This is what I did on my last trip. You’ll see that it still carries the risk of having all the data in the same area, but with internet connections being slow, and online storage beyond a few GB getting expensive, this was a risk I wasn’t too worried about.

• Site 1: Your Memory Cards. I don’t erase memory cards until I’m desperate for space.
• Site 2: A Computer Hard Drive. Most nights in Chile and Peru (until my netbook’s hard drive died), I used Lightroom to import the day’s images and give them a rough sort. Lightroom stores the photos in a Year/Month/Day folder tree, and the computer lives in my main backpack. It often stayed in the room while I was out all day. After the netbook went belly up, I used hotel computers to transfer to Site 3.
• Site 3: An External Drive. If you’re shooting a dSLR, you have no reason not to go buy at least a 500 GB drive. My WD drive is small enough that I regularly copied my Lightroom folders to the external drive with incremental backup software, and then carried the external drive in my camera bag while out for the day.

Backing up your work may seem like an extra expense or effort, but if you’re one of those people who only has one copy of your key works, how would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and it had disappeared?

I worked at an outdoor shop in Squamish when I first moved to British Columbia. Squamish is a popular climbing destination, and carries the not unusual stigma of being a town where you run a high risk of having your car broken into at the parking lots outside of town. Every now and then someone would be walking around the store making a list of items and their costs to report to their insurance company. Chatting about the theft and bad luck, it came out on two separate occasions that students on a summer road trip had lost the computer with the single digital copy of their entire grad thesis. Sure, they had various printouts and notes that they could piece back together, but the bulk of the writing was gone forever.

How many hours have you put into your manuscript, and how prepared would you be if your computer just didn’t turn on one day?

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