and it’s now available in France! (as well as 37 other countries).

This is important to photographers because one of the most neglected aspects of digital photography is having a backup strategy, let alone implementing it or keeping any regularity in this process. Most people have all their photos on one hard drive (and it’s nice we can do that), and backing up is often only about copying them to another drive. That second hard drive might be as close to the first as sitting inside the same machine or on a shelf next to it… Some people backup on DVDs or to their server over a LAN, and essentially end up with their backup sitting right next to the original in a similar fashion

Ever considered fire, flooding or robbery? Backups need to be taken off-site.

The easiest way to do this is to sync your photo library to an external hard drive that gets taken to work or to a friend’s place. But even this way, things may go wrong. Files can go corrupted without your noticing it, and it’s not unheard of to go to a backup only to realise the backup itself had been bad for a long time…

That’s where online storage comes in, according to me. It is the right place where to back your best pictures up. There is no point in trying to backup hundreds of gigabytes online: even if it wasn’t going to be expensive, it would take forever to upload (your internet connection might well be uploading 10x slower than it can download).

Online storage is the right place to store your best pictures only, the ones you don’t want to lose, whatever happens and 5GB is probably enough space for most people as this will hold several hundred pictures. And simply because it is free, it’s worth getting your skydrive and saving your precious files there. For people with needs for more space, or who want a degree of automation, it’s worth also looking at Amazon S3 in general and Jungle Disk in particular.

In the middle term, gpuViewer will feature syncing features that will allow you to keep copies of your library in sync on your external drives, on your LAN and online. Hopefully, we can totally automate your backup strategy and that’s the only way to make it truly safe.

link: Welcome to the bigger, better, faster SkyDrive!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.