Moving my photo backups off a single external drive
For a long time my backup strategy was a two-terabyte drive in a desk drawer, updated whenever I remembered. That is one copy in one place, checked by nobody.
This summer I finally did it properly. Nothing here is original; it is the usual three-two-one advice, written down mostly so I remember what I set up.
The setup
- The working library lives on the desktop.
- A nightly copy goes to the server in the hallway.
- A second copy goes to a drive that lives at my parents' flat and is swapped when I visit.
- Once a quarter I restore twenty random files and compare them.
What surprised me
The restore test found a problem on its first run: a folder of scans had never been included, because its name started with a dot. I would have discovered that on the worst possible day.
The other surprise was how little it cost. The drives were the expensive part, and they were cheaper than one lost year of photographs.