Deal of the Day: World Backup Day

It shouldn't be necessary to stress the importance of doing backups of your critical information, data, and images as we have great large capacity hard drives that we can use locally, and we have good online data services for long term storage, some even unlimited image storage including raws.

We should never forget the unsung heroes of backups, the devices we use to back up our computers and critical data on a nightly basis. (or what you should be doing anyway). If you are like me and travel a lot, not only are you backing up in case of data loss, you are backing up in case of theft. With this day and age of 1TB SD and removable cards, making an inconspicuous backup in case of theft is a wise decision. I know it sounds crazy, but you can create a nice boot drive backup onto an SD card, and safely that that stored somewhere safe. If your laptop is ever stolen, you are back up and in business in no time. Of course, that's not practical for those that have terabytes of images and video files. For that, we turn to devices that B&H has on sale for today only.

If you are in a more permanent place, then having a 4 or 5 bay RAID drive system certainly helps the loss of a hard drive failure, but you should still augment this with an off-site backup - just in case of theft, fire, or some other unforeseen disaster.

The lowly 4 or 5TB western digital portable USB hard drives are what I personally use for traveling. They are easy to carry with you, preferably in a different bag than your laptop, and have enough storage space to hold the main backup of your laptop, plus quite a few daily incremental backups. I wouldn't use these drives for long term data storage, as I have had three fail on me for different reasons; two because I dropped them, and the other one just rolled over and died. Accidents can happen when you travel. There was one failure that was at a time I didn't have some data on them backed up to an off-site storage facility or another drive. Also, the drive was irrecoverable so I lost videos and images that were, well, irreplaceable. Learn by my mistake and always back everything up. And yes, I'm one of those that should have known better ;)

One easy way of making sure you have off-site backups, especially if you are using CR2 files and not CR3's is that Amazon Prime has unlimited image storage. This allows me to backup both CR2 raw files and the JPEG files with no limits on how much I store. I do, however, have to pay to store my CR3 files as Amazon is behind the times and has not updated their RAW extensions to include Canon's CR3.

Tomorrow is a morning in which I probably won't even LOOK at rumor sites, and camera news sites - but please don't be an April fool and not have a good backup strategy. I strongly suggest that if you don't have one you are fully comfortable with, then check out the deals at B&H photovideo, as they have quite a few different devices. If you actually need some advice, don't hesitate to ask in comments, or drop me an email directly.