May 05, 2011

Who’d have thought that merely keeping computer files organized and operating smoothly/efficiently would be so difficult?

As some people may know, I’ve only recently (as in, within the past 12 months) gotten re-engaged with photography, so for awhile, I’d been able to safely store all of my RAW photo files on my laptop’s internal hard drive without any issues. Using Apple’s Time Machine software, I also had automatic backups getting stored to my external hard drive in case of computer failure.

However, a few months ago, I got to the point where my image library was bigger than my internal hard drive storage capacity, which meant that I needed a larger storing system.

After quite a bit of research, consternation, and risky behavior as a result of not having photo backups for a few weeks, I think I’ve finally gotten to a place that’ll allow me to sleep at night.**:

- 2 External Hard Drives: “Primary 1TB Western Digital external HDD” and “Backup 1.5TB Western Digital external HDD”, each separated into 2 partitions

- personal documents and ~85gb of music stored on MacBook Pro internal hard drive, automatically backed up to “Primary 1TB Western Digital external HDD, Partition #1” using Apple Time Machine

- Adobe Lightroom catalog file stored and accessed on local internal hard drive for the sake of processing speed, automatically backed up to “Primary 1TB Western Digital external HDD, Partition #1” using Apple Time Machine

- Adobe Lightroom photo files stored on “Primary 1TB Western Digital external HDD, Partition #2”

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- “Primary 1TB Western Digital external HDD” backed up to “Backup 1.5TB Western Digital external HDD” once a day using Carbon Copy Cloner so that the 2 external hard drives are mirror images of one another.

Questions/comments/glaring omissions?

**NOTE - computer memory is dirt cheap these days, so there’s no reason not to have multiple copies of your data, whether you take pictures or not. The failure rate of hard drives is 100% so it’s a question of when, not if. If I was super serious about this, I’d have an additional off-site backup, but I’m not too concerned with fires / floods / burglary in my current situation.