Life back at Crashplan

I'd posted last week about my deliberations on what to do now that Crashplan had announced that they would be ending all home accounts and only supporting business accounts.

As I mentioned in that post, there have several cloud backup services that previously offered unlimited storage have either gone out of business or changed their pricing models, which makes me concerned for the long-term viability of the model. Because of that, I was doing a trial of Backblaze's B2 cloud service and Arq Backup as the backup software on my Macs. I noted that I wasn't completely happy with this solution.

After some further deliberation and number crunching, I ended up sticking with Crashplan but upgraded to the small business account. On paper, this was going to be significantly more expensive at $10/month; I have 3 Macs that I backup with Crashplan and was previously paying $12/month on the family plan. However, Crashplan was offering a 1 year 75% discount on their small business account so for the short-term I'm actually going to save money and this buys me another year to consider my options more thoroughly and to possibly cut over to a new service in the interim without the looming threat of my current backups ending.

So let's look at the other options I did consider:

Backblaze

This may still be the overall winner for me long-term. I wasn't completely happy with the way Arq was handling my backups but the B2 service seems overall good and I can also add some files from my NAS to the same service so that's a possibility. Alternatively, I could opt for backing up my computers with their regular backup service and get some of the features I felt were missing from B2. Longer-term, maybe I can hope that they'll expand the B2 service to cover some of the gaps, or allow for a shift over to something closer to B2's storage-based pricing, or ideally even allow me to port my backups over to B2. That's a bit of speculation. The lack of a richer restore function is still a bit of a concern, but the ability to have a drive mailed to me is nice.

Carbonite

I considered it, but there's several deal breakers here. I could never quite tell if adopting an existing machine would require a re-uploading the data or not, but the big one for me was the ridiculous pricing that would require me to pay more money just to backup an external drive. On top of that, I'd also have to manually enable any large files for backup. The whole thing just seemed too clunky and the pricing felt punitive. They're really not doing themselves any favours in this regard as far as I'm concerned. Crashplan and Backblaze have clear, up front pricing, and it's 1 tier for the features. Carbonite just didn't stack up as a viable option in my mind.

Life after Crashplan

So I'm a bit late to the party here, but Crashplan has recently announced that they're going to stop offering home accounts. They've been my cloud backup solution of choice for several years now so this has put me in a bit of a bind with having a few months to sort out a new option.

There have been several recent closures of online storage options that offer unlimited storage, while other companies have stayed around but dropped their unlimited tier. There are a few players left that offer unlimited storage, but the direction within the industry doesn't leave me hopeful that they'll be able to stick around either.

So, what have I done? So far I'm not 100% sure I like my replacement but I'm trying out Backblaze's B2 cloud service. This is not the same as their main unlimited personal backup service. There are some pros and cons that come with that. First, you do pay for the storage you use, but it's quite cheap. When I ran the numbers, I think for the amount of storage I use over 3 computers it will end up slightly cheaper annually than if I paid for their personal backup service instead. Given the concern I've mentioned about unlimited plans, this isn't necessarily a con anymore.

Now the downsides are this really isn't setup as a personal backup option in the same way that Crashplan was. It's much more of a generic cloud storage option for whatever you'll put on it (similar to Amazon's S3). You just get a web interface and some API keys, you need some kind of software on your computer that will backup your files to this storage solution. I'm trying out Arq as an option at the moment, so far on 30-day free trial.

As for the cons, there's definitely a few:

1. You're definitely kind of rolling your own solution here, The B2 service is just storage with nothing else offered, you have to solve those problems yourself.
2. While Arq simplifies the backup side, I still found it a bit clunky at first to setup. I forgot to write down my application key and when I generated it again there was no way to update the key in my settings, I had to delete the backup location and add it back. Fortunately, I was able to "adopt" my older files at least.
3. The progress bar is a bit poor. It shows you what's been "scanned" and it shows how much has been uploaded in the current session, and what's remaining in the current session so far, but it's not really a nice indication of the progress of the overall backup. There's zero information on how much is remaining as the scanning seems really slow. I suppose the benefit is it starts backing up much more quickly, but Crashplan would fairly quickly sort out what had to be backed up and it was reassuring to see what percentage was completed, I don't see this in Arq.
4. Arq encrypts everything, in a way this is fantastic, as it's a nice extra layer of security. The downside is it makes the online cloud file access useless. There's really no way to access your files on the cloud, you have to download Arq to restore your files on another computer.

Now I'm not 100% sure that I'm going to stay with B2, I'll certainly keep this updated on my blog with the overall progress. I looked at Backblaze's personal backup service and besides concerns with the unlimited storage claims, I really didn't like the restore options. It doesn't seem like restore is very well supported through their offering, you simply have the options to download a zip file, or to have a drive mailed to you, that's it. There's no rich restore functionality where you can select multiple files and where to put them on your computer, you'll really just have to download the zip file and move them afterwards.

I'm looking into Carbonite as an option as well, but so far I'm not entirely convinced. One of the things I'm really concerned with is the ability to "adopt" a computer. It suggests it's possible on Carbonite, but it also seems to suggest you have to restore all of the files from Carbonite, and may have to upload them again, I'm really not clear on this and their help documentation doesn't shed much light on things. They also will only keep the files from your old computer for 30 days, so that's a major concern as well. Plus their pricing model is much more complex and I'm still trying to make sense out of which options I need so that I can decide on the best package.

HDR mistake

Okay, this one may be obvious to some, especially if you have more HDR experience. But, I figured I'd share it here figuring that if I've made this mistake then someone else is probably unaware of this too. So what was this mistake? It's pretty simple but if you're setting up your HDR shot using auto-bracketing then make sure to pay attention to what your Camera's meter is going to use for the base exposure. I was shooting in aperture priority mode and shooting into a light. Because of this my camera was tending to pick a very high shutter speed to start (exposing for the light). This was a great exposure as part of the bracket but should have been the highest shutter speed in the bracket, not the middle. Adding shutter speed above this wasn't bringing in any further detail. In some cases I even ran into multiple shots in the bracket being shot at 1/8000 since that's the maximum shutter speed on my D700. Obviously that defeats the purpose of the bracketing and this usually meant that I didn't have the slower shutter speeds I needed to bring in the shadow detail. What I should have done was picked a good middle exposure (either with exposure compensation or by switching into manual mode) and started my bracket there.

It happened to me so it could happen to you too, pay attention to your exposure!

You backup your files, what about your power?

I've been talking a lot about backup lately, and it's an important subject. However, one area tends to get overlooked and that's power. You might be backing up your files but what happens if the power goes out and you lose a pile of work? Surge protectors can be good for protecting you against power surges but if you want to survive a power outage then you need a UPS (uninterruptable power supply, not the courier company). I'll admit that this is one area where I'm a little weaker in too. Finding out good information about how big of a UPS you need is pretty tough. You don't want to have to buy more than you need but you definitely don't want to underestimate your requirements either.

I solved the problem of how big of a UPS I needed by buying one that has a display on the front that shows me how loaded the UPS is, as well as other handy things like the current voltage coming into the UPS. This is great for the piece of mind as I can visually see that I tend to hover below half way on the UPS, telling me that I have plenty of headroom. If I start running some other peripherals then I do see the graph go up higher but so far I seem to be well within the safety zone.

One thing to also watch out for is that most UPSs have a mixture of battery protected outlets and surge protected outlets. Only the battery protected outlets will stay on in a power outage so make sure that you understand how many outlets of each type your UPS has. I thought that I had enough battery protected outlets but it turned out that the power bricks on some of my peripherals blocked some of the outlets and that limited what I could put on battery. In my case, that means that if the power goes out then I'm going to lose my internet connection. Ideally, I would have liked to have that on battery but choosing between it and my external hard drive was an easy decision.

That does bring up the point that not everything needs to be on battery, and that's where the surge protected outlets come in handy. For instance, in a power outage I'm not going to be too concerned about my scanner being out of commission. The main point of a UPS is not to keep you up and running indefinitely, it's meant to give you the time to save your work and shutdown safely. This would be why I opted for the external drive rather than my internet connection, right now I don't tend to work under tight deadlines where I'd need to transfer files so I'd much rather make sure my Time Machine drive was safe.

Aside from the obvious power outages, a UPS can be great for protecting your gear against voltage drops as well. In my case, I live in an older house and when some appliances turn on the lights will dim. I used to not think anything of it but once I plugged in my UPS I started hearing it kick in briefly whenever this would happen and I could see the voltage drop on the display. I'm not certain if I was potentially doing damage to my equipment before this but it's certainly reassuring to see that my UPS will react that quickly and is protecting my computer now.

So invest in a little piece of mind and look into getting a UPS for you machine, it's not a glamorous piece of hardware by any stretch of the imagination but the first time it saves your butt when the power goes out you'll start singing its praises.

So when do you re-sample?

A quick follow-up to my post a few weeks ago on dispelling the 72dpi myth. In that post I mostly focused on the intricacies of resolution and why 72dpi doesn't really make sense. The one thing I left off from that post is when do you need to worry about resolution? Or more accurately, when do you re-sample? One of the comments from my post on the 72dpi myth talked a lot about images being resolution independent. As long as you're not changing the pixel dimensions (either adding or discarding pixels) you can freely change the resolution of the image, with no degradation of quality (or change to the file size). The point is that it's all about dimensions. When you're working on screen, you only have pixel dimensions to work with. When you're printing, then you can start thinking in terms of inches (or centimetres if you work in metric). The resolution only becomes an issue then when you're printing.

I think most of the confusion around resolution comes from the idea of re-sampling. Throw that into the mix and suddenly things seem to get really confusing when they shouldn't. Re-sampling really only does 1 of 2 things, it either makes up pixels  or throws them away. So when do you use it?

Making something bigger

Sometimes you may need to increase the number of pixels for an image. Maybe you're trying to scale up the image on screen larger than the original. Or maybe you're going to print a very large print and have determined that the resolution will be too low if you don't scale things up. In both of these cases, re-sampling is your option. There are other tools available for this but they essentially all do the same thing, they increase the image to a target size while maintaining a target resolution.

Making something smaller

These days probably the much more common case will be that you want to make an image smaller. If you're shooting full-res images with your camera you almost certainly want to shrink them down before posting them on-line. For making things smaller we're almost always talking about pixels, you rarely have to worry about an image being too high resolution for printing, unless you're sending the files to a lab and they have a file size restriction.

Save your master files!

That's really about all there is too it, don't worry about re-sampling unless you're making something bigger or smaller. Even then, simply worry about what is important to you. If you're reducing the size for the web then it's only the pixel dimensions you'll have to worry about. The last thing is though, make sure to save a copy of your file in its original resolution before you re-sample. Whenever you re-sample you're going to degrade the quality so you're going to want to make sure to keep your master files untouched when you do this. Make sure that you're saving a copy of the re-sized file.

Lightroom makes all of this easier

Adobe's Lightroom does make this a lot easier, you're not touching your original files for starters. Plus, you only deal with resolution when you export or when you print. If you're exporting for the web, just set the pixel dimensions you want. If you're exporting files to send to a lab, then just set your physical dimensions and your desired resolution. In both cases, Lightroom will do the appropriate re-sampling if necessary during the export process. I don't have any experience with Apple's Aperture but I would imagine that things work similarly for it.

Department of redundancy department

Today's post is all about redundancy. Today's post is all about redundancy. Okay, I think I've beaten that joke to death. Seriously though, I've already hit on RAID and that is one form of redundancy but when you're running a business and time is money there's still a lot more to think about in terms of redundancy. Big businesses tend to get pretty paranoid about redundancy. At my day job, everything that's in production is supposed to be fully redundant. We install our servers in pairs that are in different physical buildings, which are often quite a distance apart (if not in a nearby town). My understanding is they even go as far as making sure that the fibre optic cabling from the data centres to the ISPs (and yes, they use more than 1) don't have any points in common. The idea here is that 1 of this buildings could completely go offline and we should be able to have things up and running at the other location as quickly as possible. The other piece of this puzzle is to ensure that whatever took down the first site should not impact the other.

Now this may sound like overkill, the company I'm under contract for is a large financial services company in the US, they have literally millions of dollars on the line if there's an outage so they need this level of protection right? You're just a small self-employed photographer so you don't need something that elaborate right? Wrong. While you may not have to get as paranoid about redundant fibre links and such consider the impact of an outage to your business. While it may not number in the millions it doesn't have to in order to bring your business to its knees. You might only lose out on a few thousand dollars from a missed deadline but how easily can you absorb that loss? So what's your plan if something goes south?

Computers

Let's start with the basics, what happens if your computer dies on you? I've already covered backup options previously but this goes a little further than that. Suppose you're under the gun on a big deadline and the power supply on your computer dies. I'll assume here that you've got a killer backup strategy so you've only lost any changes since your last save (you do save frequently don't you?). Okay so your files are safe but that doesn't do you any good if you don't have a computer to pull them up on now does it? If you're a larger studio then you probably have more than 1 computer in the studio so that's a viable solution. Or how about a laptop? Worst case scenario, do you have a home computer that you could press into service (you are keeping your work computer separate from your home computer right?), does it have all the necessary software installed? Can it get the files you need?

Internet Service

It's a couple hours until your deadline, you just need to upload them to the client's server, but your internet connection has just dropped. You call up your ISP and find out they need to send out a technician to investigate the issue and since you're a residential customer that's going to be 3 days from now. Okay, first of all, what the heck are you doing running your business on a residential internet connection? Yes business internet accounts tend to be a lot more expensive but they usually carry with that expense a higher priority when it comes to outages. Even if you have a business account maybe it's still too long to wait to get it fixed. Do you have a 2nd internet connection with another ISP? If you have a studio separate from your home can you use your home broadband connection? If so, is it with the same provider? What do you do if the outage isn't a problem on your end but is due to a backhoe cutting the ISPs main fibre connection, cutting off the entire city's customers? Sound far fetched? I've seen it happen. Okay, so work and home internet connection are out of the question. Well, can you use your cell phone's data plan to upload the files (probably painfully slow but I'm talking desperation time now)? Or how about the coffee shop's wi-fi connection? Again, probably not the fastest option but could work in a pinch.

Physical location

This one is really tough for the small business. If you have a separate studio then the obvious option is to work out of your house. More importantly though, this really hammers home the importance of having at least 1 offsite backup for your files. If a catastrophe like a fire hits you most likely have other immediate concerns on your plate but you've also lost your livelihood if you're a full-time photographer. How long until insurance pays out? How do you keep your cash flow running in the meantime. Getting back to work might be the furthest thing from your mind but it may be a necessity in order to keep the money flowing.

You

I'll wrap up my thoughts with asking what happens if you're incapacitated or worse? Obviously if you're a one person shop then you're future bookings are more than likely off. But, do you have an assistant that can fill in for you? What about your partner or spouse, how much of the books do they know in order to sort things out if you can't? For that matter, are they even authorized to do so? Worst case scenario, if you die how well protected is your family in terms of not being burdened with a huge debt from you and how able will they be to make a living off your legacy of images? I know it's not a fun topic to think about but how would your feel if your family had no way of benefiting from the wealth of the images you've created over your career?

Test, test, test!

My final closing words will be that whatever options you deem necessary, make sure you test them! With my day job we're required to completely power down each of our major data centres on an annual basis. This is a literal powering down of the building. This forces us to make sure that nothing have slipped in that only runs in 1 data centre or can't be easily failed over. Similarly, it forces us to prove that we can keep fully operational while 1 of the data centres is out of commission. Similarly, this policy can even extend to key people in the company, it's not as frequent but many staffers are required to go on mandatory vacation. During the period of mandatory vacation their access is turned off so that they can't log onto any systems. There are some safeguards in place that can allow them to get it back if necessary but the purpose is to demonstrate that they can be gone for a period of time and things won't fall apart without them. I'm not saying you have to go to all of these extremes but make sure you do test out your redundancy plans before you find yourself having to rely on them.

Dispelling the 72 dpi myth

I first wrote my article explaining the difference between DPI and PPI around 10 years ago. To put it in perspective, it originated as a post on Usenet. I posted that article mainly to help clear up the difference in the terms because I was frequently seeing them misused. Way back then I'd always planned a follow-up article on what I like to call the "72 dpi myth". This week's Tech Tuesday instalment seems as good a time as any to finally complete the follow-up piece to that article. Okay, so what the heck is the 72 dpi myth? It's really more of a collection of incorrect ideas about resolution and how it relates to screen display. One of the more common places you'll see it is people recommending to save your images at 72 dpi when posting online. The usual reasoning for this is so that the images are only good for screen display and don't have enough resolution for a good sized print. There are other variations which often quote 72 dpi as the resolution that all images are displayed on screen.

First things first, strictly speaking we're talking about pixels per inch (ppi) not dots per inch (dpi). I'm calling this the 72 dpi myth because that's how I most often hear it. But this post isn't about the terminology, I already have an entire article devoted to that. My concern today is how this myth perpetuates a misunderstanding about resolution. At best, this spreads ignorance and confusion. At worst it can lead people to think that their web images are too low resolution to be of any use from a would-be image thief when they're actually posting very high quality images.

Readers of my DPI vs. PPI article should already understand the issue here; pixels per inch only matters when you're printing. On screen the only thing you have to worry about is the pixel dimensions. The ppi setting does absolutely nothing on-screen! If you're concerned about posting images that can't be printed very large then all you need to do is worry about the pixel dimensions. Do some quick math to figure out what size you could print the image at an acceptable quality. I'd say 150 ppi is about as low as you can go and get any kind of reasonable quality for a smaller print. So with that figure in mind, an image that's 600 pixels on the wide side would only end up being 4" on the long side. I don't think most people are too concerned about people making postcard-sized prints so this can be a good starting point. I'm not trying to throw out any hard and fast rules though, I post my pictures on my stie at larger sizes than that and I'm not overly concerned. Some people are worried even about this size and won't go above 400 pixels on the long dimension. Figure out your comfort level and go from there.

My point here is that on the screen it's all about pixel dimensions, not the ppi setting. The ppi setting is just a small piece of information that goes along with the file to say how large the image should be printed. However, that can be changed at any time without any loss of quality as long as you're only adjusting the ppi setting and not re-sampling. For example, if I were to post a full 12 megapixel image from my D700 it's not going to matter whether I set the ppi to 72 or 300 or something even higher, it's still a full-size image!

If this is still unclear let's look at this from the other direction, screen displays. The statement that all computer screens display at 72 ppi is dis-proven with a simple examination. Look at standard monitor resolutions; in the old days of 4:3 monitors you had resolutions like 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1024. In these days of wide-screen displays you see resolutions like 1440x900, 1920x1080, etc. Notice that in all of these examples I'm only talking about pixel dimensions, not the size of the screen. Suppose you have 2 wide-screen monitors, a 19" and a 24", if both are using the same resolution of 1440x900 then clearly the larger monitor is displaying at a lower resolution. Perhaps the best way to really hammer this home is with televisions since they're displays just like computer monitors. "Full HD" is 1080p (1920x1080). Walk into an electronics store and find the smallest 1080p TV you can find, it's probably going to be somewhere in the 30" sizes, now compare that to a 60" TV or bigger that's still displaying at 1080p, or how about some 100" projection screen that's 1080p too. Are you honestly going to say that all of them are displaying at 72 ppi? Clearly they aren't.

More recently I've even stumbled across a new version of this myth that's specific to the iPhone and iPad where higher resolutions (132 ppi for the iPad, 326 ppi for an iPhone 4G) are recommended for these displays. Hopefully by now you can dismiss this advice based on your understanding of resolution. Again, all that matters is the pixel dimensions. If you're concerned with iPhone or iPad display then just go by the pixel dimensions and figure out what you want to use from there (remember though that higher resolutions will allow for zooming). I think some of the confusion here comes from Apple publishing the ppi specs for their displays but recognize that's only useful for comparing with another device's display if you're interested in which display has the higher resolution.

Rollback

What do you do when a "routine" upgrade goes bad? How about a "minor" change to your website that breaks the whole site? How quickly can you recover? Can you even recover? This week's Tech Tuesday feature is all about rollback options. I've spent the last few weeks talking about back-up options. That's a topic that should already be pretty familiar to most people. This week I want to talk about something that's probably a littler further afield for most photographers and other small business operators, the concept of rollback.

In my day job I work as an IT consultant working on a contract for a very large financial services provider in the US. In that environment all changes to the production environment are highly controlled. This is both for regulatory reasons and to ensure that the change won't have an unforeseen affect on trading operations. This means that every change has to be very well planned in advance including when the change will be made and the steps that will be performed. This change request then goes through several levels of approval before you're finally allowed to make the change. Even then, that change is only approved for the time that you said you would do it and should only include the work that you said you would do. Can this be very bureaucratic? You bet. Does it eat up a lot of time? It sure does. But, when a change going wrong can cost the firm millions of dollars it makes sense.

I'm certainly not going to suggest that this level of planning or scrutiny is necessary for a single photographer or a small studio, it just doesn't make sense. However, there is one big piece of this process which does have a lot of value for even the smallest businesses. Aside from describing the steps that will be taken in the change we're also required to provide a backout (or rollback) plan. Essentially, for every change request we have to say what we'll do if the sh*t hits the fan. No rollback plan? No approval. No matter what size your operation is, this is a mindset you need to start adopting. It's one thing if your home computer is out of commission for awhile but if it's your work computer then that's lost revenue.

Let's look at a current example, Apple recently released Final Cut Pro X. You take a look at the features videos and think it looks awesome and gleefully install it. Then you find out that it won't work with projects from Final Cut Pro 7. Oh, and your plug-ins don't work any more either. Now what? That's when you decide how much of a big deal that is to you and make the call on whether you can live with that or if it's time to initiate your rollback plan. You did make a rollback plan right? No? Well then I guess you're stuck with living with it.

The thing is, rollback doesn't have to be anything elaborate. If you always keep a bootable back-up drive then it can be as simple as making sure that back-up is up to date prior to making significant updates or other big changes. That way if anything goes wrong you can simply boot off that back-up (remember to test this first!) and then use that back-up to restore back to that good state.

Or, if you have multiple systems then maybe you just need to try out an update on a system that you can afford to have out of commission if things go south. If you have both a desktop and a laptop then figure out which one is more important to you right now and try out the update on the other one first. If things don't go well then at least your main system isn't affected and it buys you time to fix the other system. Strictly speaking, that's not as good of a rollback option but at least you're thinking, "if things do go bad how do I keep working?"

Rollback is all about having a quick way to get out of trouble. If you can't handle being down for a few hours to a few days while you reinstall everything (and really, who can these days?) then I strongly urge you to start thinking about how to protect yourself when making changes.

Mirrors, snapshots and incremental back-ups

Following up on the back-up theme from last week's Tech Tuesday post, RAID is not Back-up, I'm going into a little more depth on some back-up options and what each of them offers. This week I want to talk about 3 very popular options; mirrors, snapshots and incremental back-ups.

Mirrors

This is really a bit of a follow-up from last week's discussion on RAID vs. back-up. One very common RAID level is RAID 1, also known as a mirror. This involves taking 2 identical disks and setting them up so that whatever is written to 1 is written to the other disk at the same time. As mentioned last week, this is great for reliability and that's why I'm including it here as part of a back-up strategy. The idea is 1 of the drives can fail and you'll still be up and running with the other drive. As mentioned last week, this is great for protecting you against drive failures but it doesn't help you recover an individual file. If you accidentally change or delete a file it's going to be changed on both drives.

There is another type of mirror that doesn't involve RAID. Rather than setting up a RAID you can keep a second disk which is an automatic back-up of the main drive. The idea here is very similar to RAID 1 but the copying would be less frequent. With RAID 1 all changes are written to both disks at the same time. Instead, you could setup your mirror drive to be written to every hour, or possibly just at the end of the day. The big advantage is that if you do accidentally delete a file you can still find it on the mirror drive. The other advantage is that you can turn off that mirroring when you are making major changes (such as installing updates) and want to make sure that you can back out of the changes if necessary (more on this next week).

Ideally, you should be able to boot your computer from this mirror. That's extremely useful if an update goes catastrophically wrong and your main drive is in an unusable state. I don't want to get into a Mac vs. PC debate but this is one area that is significantly easier to manage on a Mac since you can always startup off of any drive that has Mac OS X installed and you don't run into any issues with drive letters changing or similar. I'm not saying it can't be done on a PC, there just may be more involved in setting it up.

The big downside of this variation is time. It takes a lot longer to copy over all of the data. In order to ensure that all of the data is exactly the same the mirror should take a complete copy of the original disk, you can't really reliably just copy things that changed. The idea is that every byte on the back-up drive should be identical as the first drive and that requires a lot of time to copy and verify.

Snapshots

A snapshot is pretty much what it sounds like; it's a back-up strategy where you take an exact copy of the drive as it is right now. Depending on your back-up software this may be a compressed copy or simply a full copy of all of the files stored in a folder on another disk. The big advantage over a mirror (especially a RAID 1 mirror) is that you should be able to recover a file that you accidentally changed, just grab it from the snapshot. The exact steps involved with this will depend on your back-up software.

Obviously one of the big disadvantages for this strategy is disk space. If you have 2TB of data and take a full snapshot of that data every day then even after a single week you'll need 14TB to store that! That's one of the main reasons why back-up software will normally compress the back-up. This will add some time in creating the back-up and in restoring any particular file but the savings in storage space may make it worthwhile.

Typically, when working with snapshots you'll setup some type of strategy for rotating out old copies. One common strategy is to take a daily snapshots and then only keep 1 snapshot from the previous weeks going back a month and then only keep a single monthly snapshot going back to whatever period you feel you'll need. A lot of this can depend on how much data you have and how far back you may need to go. Yes, this can take up a lot of space but don't underestimate the value of being able to go back a few days, or even weeks, when it's some time before you realize that you deleted the wrong file.

Incremental back-ups

Incremental back-ups are often combined with snapshots. As outlined above, snapshots can take a lot of time to create and eat up a lot of space. Instead of creating a full snapshot every day most back-up software can instead create a full snapshot less frequently and then simply save a back-up of any files that have changed since the last back-up separately.

Obviously this can save a significant amount of space, how much will depend on how many files you change (or new files you create) in between back-ups but it's always going to take up less space than a full snapshot. The big downside is you don't have a full snapshot of the state of your disk as often. This can prove to be a major issue if the last snapshot turns out the be bad. For example, suppose that you take weekly snapshots and then do incremental back-ups throughout the week. If it's day 6 of your incremental back-ups when your disk fails then you may be faced with losing a lot of last week's work. The other downside is that it can take your back-up software a lot longer to restore all of your files as it first has to restore the snapshot and then step through each incremental back-up from that point.

So where does Time Machine fit into all of this?

So far I've tried to stay more theoretical but since every recent version of Mac OS X includes Apple's Time Machine software for backing up I thought it was important to touch on it a little bit, especially because it doesn't really fit into any of the options I've outlined above.

Essentially, Time Machine does a bit of a mix between a snapshot and an incremental back-up. When Time Machine runs for the first time it makes a complete copy of the contents of the drive(s) you're backing up. After that, it runs periodically (hourly by default) and makes a new copy of any files that have changed since the last time it's run. So far this sounds a lot like an incremental back-up right? The big difference is that due to the way Time Machine stores the files you will always be able to get to all of the files as they looked at that particular point in time, even those that haven't changed. This makes it look a lot like you're taking full snapshots every hour since you see all of your files.

The important thing to realize is that while you can see all of your files for each time that Time Machine ran, it only writes a new copy of files that have changed. This means that while all of the unchanged files show up for that time period they aren't a separate copy, they're the exact same file as was written to the disk when that particular file changed, or potentially going all the way back to the initial snapshot. This does save a ton of space and it's a great piece of engineering to make restoring files easy but it's important to realize you will only ever have 1 copy of any change for a file.

When you get right down to it, Time Machine is really a system where a single snapshot is taken right at the beginning and everything after that is an incremental back-up. Don't get me wrong, Time Machine is a great back-up solution because of how simple it is and because Apple has done an incredible job of making back-up simple enough for everyone. The big thing to realize is that it should only be part of a complete back-up strategy that employs other options like those I've outlined above.

It's probably easiest to illustrate the potential issue with an example. Suppose you accidentally delete a file that you last worked on over a month ago. When you go back an hour in Time Machine and restore the file you discover that the file is corrupted. You don't panic right away because you think, "that's okay, I'll just go back further". But, you're sunk, the last time this file was written to Time Machine's back-up drive was a month ago when you last worked on it. While it will look like you have several copies of that file since then each of those will be the same corrupted file that you restored the first time. If you're lucky then you'll have another back-up in Time Machine from before the last set of changes that you made but then you're going to lose whatever those changes were.

Test your back-ups!

A final word on back-ups; if you're not testing your back-up strategy periodically then you really don't have a back-up strategy. A proper back-up strategy should always be tested. That doesn't mean you should format your main hard drive every week but at times you should be testing to make sure that you can restore your system from your back-ups. It's a terrible feeling to think that you're properly protected when your system fails only to discover that your back-ups are missing crucial files, or simply don't work. Better to discover this before you have a problem so that you can address any shortcomings ahead of time.

RAID is not back-up

Decided to try something new with the blog part of my site. My day job is in IT so I decided to start doing some technology posts with a photography slant. Trying to get into the habit of blogging more often so as part of that I'm going to see if I can make this a weekly feature for the site. I'm going to call this series "Tech Tuesdays". The goal is to have something new posted every Tuesday. For the next couple of weeks I'd like to hit on storage and back-up and how to protect your photos. So with that in mind, I'm kicking this series of with RAID is not back-up. I've seen several cases where people mistakenly thought that they didn't need to back-up their data because they have that data on a RAID system and I wanted to clear up what a RAID is for and why you still need a proper back-up strategy.

What is RAID?

Let's quickly cover what a RAID is. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent depending on who you ask) Disks. In a nutshell, it's a way of combining a number of disks together for performance or reliability.

There's a number of different styles of RAID (referred to as levels) but the basic idea is that 1 or more of the drives should be able to fail without you losing all of your data (that's where the redundant part comes in). Since photographers tend to have a large collection of photos and would perish the thought of losing them RAIDs tend to be a popular storage solution.

The different RAID levels and how they work is well covered elsewhere so I'm not going to go into it further here. If you need more information, the Wikipedia article on RAID is a good starting point.

Reliability vs. Back-up

The important thing to realize is that RAID is about reliability for keeping a disk system up and running, this is also referred to as high-availability. The point is that a drive can fail and the system will keep running. This is very useful, especially if you're working under a deadline but it's not a back-up.

The purpose of backing up is to have a second copy (or preferably, multiple copies) of your files. If you accidentally delete a file you want to be able to recover it, RAID doesn't offer this. Ideally your back-up strategy should include at least 1 off-site copy of your data, a RAID system doesn't do this. The important thing to realize is that while theoretically the RAID system may contain more than 1 copy of your files it's not stored in a manner that can allow for you to easily retrieve these files. The purpose of a RAID system is to recover all of the data when a drive fails, not for recovering a single lost file.

A warning about RAID 0

There's a specific level of RAID called RAID 0. This RAID level, also called striping, spreads your data across more than 1 disk. However, there is no redundancy in the data. What this means is that if any of the disks fail the entire RAID system will go down, which means you will lose everything on the RAID. That's important enough to repeat, you will lose everything.

RAID 0 is all about performance, not reliability (arguably, at the expense of reliability). If you need that performance then a RAID 0 system can be very fast, but it's important to understand that you're playing with fire unless you have a solid back-up strategy. All hard drives fail at some point and the idea of losing several disks' worth of data because of a single disk failure should be terrifying. I know a lot of people chance it with a single disk in terms of not backing up, do not do this with a RAID 0 system, you will lose your data at some point.

When to use RAID

There's nothing wrong with RAID, just make sure to use it for what it's intended for. RAID can be a great way to create a high capacity back-up system that can also handle 1 or more drive failures. Similarly, RAID 0 can offer performance that simply can't be matched by most single-drive systems, just make sure to keep my warning above in mind. Combine RAID 0 for your main data with a solid back-up strategy and you can have high performance and peace of mind.

In other words, use the 2 for what they're intended for. Back-ups protect your files while RAID protects your disks. If your budget allows for it then combining both options is great. The important thing to remember is that if you have a solid back-up strategy then you can still recover from a total disk failure whereas a RAID on its own doesn't protect you from accidental changes or deletions of files. So if you can only afford one then go for a solid back-up solution first.