One of the things that most of my photographer buddies know is that I’m a freak about backup copies of my work. My work is my work, and my work is my life’s blood. To protect that, I am freaky about making sure I have abundant copies.

My primary working copy sits on a 1GB spindle. I have a backup of that work that sits on a separate spindle. I have another copy on DVD. And then I have another copy on a different brand of DVD, to help insure against early disc rot.

Scott Kelby has written a piece about backup strategies (in general) and his backup strategy. His strategy works for him, and features a piece of gear that I’ve been lusting over — a Drobo. That’s not what forced the muse through my fingers tonight though.

The thing that caused a pause for me was Scott writing about using a USB jumpdrive for backups of his shooting sessions for his clients. I’ve been pondering that concept — it’s relatively cheap, physically durable, and extremely small. The thing that’s made me question this is the durability of the data on the drive. If it doesn’t have a lifespan at least as long as DVD media, then I’m not sure how much it buys me.

The other thing that has me on the fence with this move is the cost to go back and store my old stuff. I think I’m in the 300GB range for my digital imagery since 2001, and that doesn’t even capture my scans of old film and video conversions from old VCR tapes. We’re talking a bunch of drives!

I wonder if part of the storage strategy with jumpdrives would be to, once a year or so, engage in a “refresh day”. This would involve copying all the data from each drive to a harddrive, and then back to the jumpdrive from which it came. This would freshen the storage, but I have no idea if that’s even needed with the technology jumpdrives are based on.

Just some more random ponderin’……