Are Your Files Safe with Tim Walck Photography?

File handling is a very very important part of being a professional photographer.  I am an over organized geeky file Nazi when it comes to proper storage of a client’s images. 

The thing about storing a clients files, is that they may come back in days, months, or even years, looking for a specific image that I made for them.  They could be looking for an image because they just wanted one, or they finally had the budget for an over the top customized art installation, or… tragedy could strike.  What if the client lost their home to a flood or fire, along with their wedding DVD, custom designed album, metal printed wall collage, and 30x40 canvas gallery wrap….  Insurance may cover the replacement costs, but if the images were nowhere to be found, what would they do?  Cry.   And it wouldn’t be the tears of joy that normally happen in my shop!

I know the images that I create at a wedding are a once in a lifetime memory, and it is imperative that I keep those precious memories safe.  I employ a simple system for safe keeping of everything.  First – Images are transferred from memory cards onto two external hard drives.  At this moment there will now be 3 copies of each file (until the camera’s memory cards are cleared).  After I get through processing the gallery of images, it is then uploaded to my website, and the memory cards are cleared.  This means that there are always 3 copies of the images – 2 in house, and 1 copy in an off-site location.  Now – to get to the super nerdy stuff!

One hard drive is a dedicated “archive” drive, which will eventually become full, then it is date labeled and stored.  The archive drive only gets the RAW files – un processed.   The other drive is my “working directory”.  On this drive, I do all of the actual editing, processing, and storing of essential business files.  No actual images are stored on my computer itself – the computer is mean for running applications, so I keep it clean and free of space sucking high-res imagery.  And then there is a third drive - which exists only to back up the computer itself using TimeMachine.

My working directory hard drive is actually a configuration of 5 2TB drives stacked in a Drobo5D enclosure.  I use Western Digital Red drives because of their archival qualities (I could go on and on about these, but you your eyes will glaze over if they haven’t already!).  The enclosure is set up in a "BeyondRAID" configuration, which means that each individual file is written across 4 drives.  This way if one drive fails, the other 3 will have the necessary information to re-create the missing data.  Think of it as a math equation (and really… that’s all computer data is – 1s and 0s) – if
you have A + B = C, you know the number for A, and C, so to find B you subtract A from C.  BeyondRAID also allows for swapping drives in and out of the enclosure that are of different manufactures, different spindle speeds, or even SSDs.

To add even more security, I have my specific enclosure set up so that the 5^th drive is a clone of one of the other 4.  To add to the security and durability, I chose the DROBO unit because it has an excellent built in surge protector, as well as a battery backup that allows for final data transfer to occur before the drive cuts tasks off and shuts down properly in the event of a power failure.  Not that I am a Drobo representative - but this enclosure also has a 6th bay for a solid state drive in the bottom, which acts as a hardware accelerator (a solid state drive can write much faster than any drive that spins, so data is pushed onto the 128GB SSD, then moved a
cross the rest of the drives within the unit - allowing very high data write speeds, and dramatically increasing the overall system's performance).

Tim, that sounds great, but won’t you run out of room eventually?  Yes, and No.  The Drobo unit is very expandable.  I can pull out a 2TB drive, and swap in a 4TB drive, and the Drobo unit will re-build the necessary information, plus I will now have more head room.  But yes – one day I could have the entire thing maxed out with 5 of the highest capacity drives.  I could do 3 things in this scenario – 1) Pick a fixed amount of data… lets say 4 years of work – and copy it to another external drive to become archived.   2) Daisy chain another Drobo enclosure via the Thunderbolt port, and continue to expand the storage room.  3) Upgrade to an infinitely expandable network storage solution.  

As you can see – I have spent a great deal of time and resources to cover the possibilities of device failure, theft, or un foreseen tragedies such as fire or flood.  With images stored in 3 places, and one being off-site, as well as the well armed RAID 5 configured Drobo unit, all of the work that has been put into creating images of once in a life time event is very well safe-guarded.