Hard disk drives crash when you least expect it, but you can be sure that it will happen some day. My backup methods have changed a lot over the years, from burning CDs and DVDs, simple file copying from one disk to another, and on to more automated systems. Today I use a combination of many separate things, and I want to share my experiences with you.

My main photo software today is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3, which is an absolutely awesome piece of software. I have never had such control over my photos as I have with Lightroom. In Lightroom everything is neatly organized by date, and it is also a very powerful photo developing tool. Lightroom imports my photos from my memory cards and stores them in folders based on date taken, and the root folder with all its subfolders is my main target to back up. The information about changes done to the images is stored in a catalog file (Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat) that grows with the photo collection. This is also a very important file to keep safe.

My backup system today:
-Computer backup to my file server, running Windows Home Server. This system backs up all my files automatically, including photo folders. (After setting it up in the Windows Home Server setup).

-Mozy backup software running twice a day, backing up all my photos and Lightroom catalog file to a server in USA. The files are strongly encrypted and i feel safe that Mozy is very professional. This is my last resort if all my local backup fails.

-Mozy local backup. The latest version of the Mozy software lets you back up the backup set to a local usb device, as an addition to the online backup. This is a very nice feature, and I'm running a USB hard disk drive for this purpose, and it works really well.

-Once every 6 monts or so i copy my backup to a NAS storage at my parents house. This is quite time consuming, but still worth the effort.

I am very satisfied with my backup solution today, and most of the time I don't even think about it. The Mozy backup software and Windows Home Server just tells me that the backup went OK, I don't lift a finger for this to happen. The manual backup is not really important, and is not something I do very often. If there is anything that bothers me, it got to be the Mozy backup which will take weeks to get back from the servers in USA. The speed has been improved the last couple of years, but still a bottleneck if you have a lot of data. I still think it is a small cost to pay for getting my photos back in an emergency.

Another tip I want to share with you is a free backup program called 'Microsoft Synctoy' which is dead simple to setup and use. It is really worth a try if you want to back up files from one location to another. I used this program until Mozy added the local disk function to their software. Download here.

Leave a comment if you have better solutions or ideas to improve backup plans, or want to know more about mine. :)