Get The Idea

No, don’t expect this to be about juicy compromising pictures of Tiger Woods. It’s much simpler and yet apparently more complex for many. It simply has to do with a photographer (Scott Kelby) facing the dilemma of removing his (great) pictures of Tiger Woods from his blog and sports portfolio, after a number of people in his target audience are asking him to do so on the grounds of “moral unworthiness”.

You can access Scott’s blog entry here, along with the more than 100 comments people left (all supportive of his decision to keep the pictures).

I find that issue and the ensuing thread fascinating! It turns out that that was the first story I read, just before taking a sip of coffee yesterday morning and I was all fired up and posted my response on the blog.

I commented on three things:

1) that in this story like in so many others, we make a big deal out of a very mundane situation (man cheats on wife, wife catches him) because WE have decided to elevate someone to Sainthood

2) that yet again we have a group of people that have the nerve to impose their moral standards on others, unsolicited, and appoint themselves as moral judges and juries. I don’t like it because it is plain rude, and because people will cave in and be politically correct, and the world becomes a bit more average and grey (and the real issues don’t get solved in the meantime). As a photographer, I like color, contrast and saturation.

3) the main issue – one that I am surprised to see so many people not addressing in the comments: what do Tiger’s actions have to do with the right of a photographer to display pictures of the man? Photography is capturing a moment, a person, a scene, good or bad, ugly or beautiful. A photographer (or any artist) should not compromise her work by asking creative permission from any group (unless of course you want to live in a totalitarian regime like ex-Russia or China). The artist exerts his freedom of choice and expression at creation time. The recipient exerts his freedom of choice and expression by selecting what to view or listen to. Going back to my point #1 above, if all we agreed to photograph and display was the nice and beautiful, we would not have much to turn our lenses to – nor would we even be able to agree on what “nice and beautiful” is!

To be continued…

I ran across this very neat project to create a dictionary based on photographs, where each word is associated with a photograph that illustrates the word litteraly or figuratively. Best of all, pictures are user-submitted! A photographic wiki of sort.

http://www.thephotographicdictionary.org/home.html

In this 3rd part on backing-up your photo portfolio, let’s discuss how we piece it all together to get to a solid and reliable backup of all our photos.

I recommend a backup implementation with these 3 pieces:

1) an archive of the pictures, which lets us retrieve pictures that we mistakenly deleted and offers some protection against viruses and other malware;
2) a backup copy of the entire portfolio, which is necessary to get us back and running quickly in the event of a hardware failure;
3) a backup of the archive that we maintain offsite, physically or online.

Note that you could instead keep a backup copy of the portfolio offsite, but the above implementation gives you a complete backup set, and 2 copies of each critical component (the entire photo portfolio itself, and its archive).

For archiving pictures, you want to use software that will do so automatically, on a schedule that you set (hourly, daily or weekly depending on the rate at which you grow your photo library). There are lots of backup software available on both the PC and the Mac, and I am going to recommend a couple for Windows and Mac that I think would work well. My selection is based on capabilities (incremental file backups on an automatic schedule), ease of use (we want a reliable backup of our photos that we can just “set and forget” without an degree in IT), and cost (less than $100). One thing I will also insist on is that the files are backed up in their native format, ie. there is no proprietary file format used to create the backup. I’ve been burned before by such programs that may spare you some storage space, but can make it very difficult down the road to recover your backup unless you use the exact same backup system (as nothing else can read your backup archive).

For Windows users, Second Copy 7 seems like a great choice. At $30, this backup software offers an easy to use interface that takes you through the backup process in plain english. You can read more about it in this PC Magazine review.

Second Copy 7 easy to use interface in plain English

For Mac users, if you are running Leopard (OS X 10.5) then you have TimeMachine that is possibly the most effective overall backup solution I’ve used (because it is so simple and transparent to use), but you’ll have to live with its limitations in that it can only manage one backup archive of your Mac. You cannot create a separate backup archive of only your digital photos (though you could tell TimeMachine to only backup your photos and not the rest of your files, which I do not recommend).

I’m also using Dantz Retrospect on the Mac, which is a more traditional backup solution. I am not satisfied by it however (Retrospect stores the archive in a proprietary file that you cannot access outside of Retrospect Restore feature. Dantz has been bought by EMC and is taking a clear IT/business direction) and I am looking for some other solution to complement TimeMachine.

Let’s look at how to protect a photo portfolio from the various risks:

1) Human and software error – archiving is the best protection. Having a backup copy helps but only for a limited amount of time, until the new copy is made that will incorporate all the new changes (and the error we are trying to recover from). Unfortunately, the better your backup copy implementation is, the worst this gets: a RAID 1 solution for example makes copies “on-the-fly”, which means your errors are almost immediately part of the backup copy.

2) Storage and device creep – this is sort of new one I think given the recent burst in both digital sensor capabilities and RAW mode use. Thank god, the explosion of hard drive capacities at rapidly falling cost per gigabyte, makes this not too hard to deal with. The solution? Buy much bigger hard drives and move your portfolio and backups on these new devices. This is obviously easier said then done (there is a real cost involved and time required to move hundreds of gigabytes around). The key then is to leap forward as much as possible in front of your storage needs and have enough storage to last you for 6 months or a year, and proceed to the upgrade 1 or 2 times a year only.
I will also mention that more flexible and expandable solutions of multiple drive bay arrays are becoming available to the prosumer market (like the Drobo drives) and will help. More on this in another post.

3) Mechanical failure – the solution here is redundancy. You must have your photos copied on at least 2 different physical drives (not different partitions of a same drive), preferrably located in different enclosures (primary and secondary drives inside one PC enclosure are not as redundant since they both are subject to failure of one common component). External USB/Firewire drives are cheap and offer plenty of storage these days.

4) Physical disaster – this is where offline storage is a must. You must have a copy stored on a device that is located in different premises (house or office building) than your main files. This could be a USB drive that you make a backup copy to, then take to your mom’s house and store in a closet, or to a safe deposit box at the bank. Or it could be server storage at an internet provider that you make regular copies to. Several companies now offer such backup services and some are targeting photographers specifically.

Now that we have a better idea of how we can use the various solutions for managing the risks, the next post will be about some possible implementations.

Following my multiple hard drive failures a few weeks ago I decided to implement a more serious backup strategy for my digital photos (close to 300 Gigs and growing).

Part 1 – Understanding the risks and how to manage them

I read some blog posts from other photographers on their backup strategy, namely Scott Kelby’s, Ken Rockwell’s and some others by doing a search on Google.

First impression – this is more complex and involved than I would have thought. There are several risk factors that you need to manage, and there are a number of different technologies available that tackle some of the problems, but none all at once.

The risks that you need to consider in a backup strategy are:
1) Human and computer error – possibly the most common risk. You (or someone with access to your computer) hit delete too quickly in Lightroom or Aperture, you delete a folder, you reformat a drive that had pictures on it, files get corrupted, you get a software virus, etc.
2) Storage device creep – not often mentionned, this relates to your photo library growing fast and spanning an increasing number of storage devices – external drives, DVDs, etc. to the point where it becomes difficult to manage the large number of physical storage devices. That state increases your exposure to “human error” or “mechanical failure”.
3) Mechanical failure – a dead drive, a zapped PC, a defective CD-R, etc.
4) Physical disaster – a fire, flood, etc.

How then do you get protection against theses risks?

A thorough backup strategy will involve backup copies, backup archives, local and offline (not local) storage.
- a backup copy is just that – a secondary integral copy of your photo portfolio. If you lose an original photo, you can retrieve the copy.
- a backup archive is a collection of backup copies. An archive is necessary to protect your portfolio from changes you make to it over time: if you do a daily backup copy of your portfolio and deleted a picture 2 days ago, that picture will also be deleted from your daily backup copy and you would not be able to get that photo back. Backup archives would allow you to go back to your portfolio copy from 2 days ago, and see your porfolio as it looked then and retrieve that deleted picture. Archiving is limited only by the physical storage you have on hand. When you run out of space you either have to get more storage or delete older archives to make space for new ones.
- local storage can be your computer hard drive, external USB drives, CD or DVD disks, other storage shared on the local network, etc.
- offline storage is any storage that is kept in a different physical location than the rest of your storage. It can be a hard drive you keep at a friend’s house, in a bank safe deposit box, or space you have at an online data center facility (hosted servers that you access via a WAN, FTP or via the internet).

In the next post I’ll go over what solution works best to protect each type of risk. Then we’ll look at how to execute practically the backup strategy.