A Locations,Yosemite

Between Christmas and New Years, I was in Yosemite valley with the opportunity to shoot the historic free climb of El Capitan. Aside from the frigid temperatures, the only problem I had was losing a morning of shooting when my compact flash card failed. KomputerBay did eventually replace the card, the photos of the climbers could not be replaced.

Once before, I had a failure of my RAID 6 system and spent $4500 recovering 80% of the photos (it took 6 months).  One set of photos that I could not recover was dolphins playing and jumping in the surf right next to the shore, priceless pics.

Spinning media will fail, it is just a question of when.  It seems to fail most often with power sags and surges, but it will fail.

So, here is what I have done, it doesn’t prevent the compact flash from going bad (should not have bought the cheap brand).  On the computer itself, I have a RAID 5 with 16TB of usable space.  I have a Synology NAS system with 35TB of usable space that is RAID 6.  Weekly I backup changes from my computer storage to my NAS storage.  However, if there were a fire, or earthquake, or lightening bolt, all of this would be GONE !

I don’t have the patience (and I found out after the first crash) that DVD backups don’t last more than a year or 2 before they start to degrade.  So, I have signed up for online backup with BackBlaze.  It has taken about 1.5 years to get all of the files backed up, but now there is an offline storage for all of the photos as well.

What would you pay after you lose your photos to have them back??? Maybe some pre planning and action is in order.