A couple of things happened this week that prompted this post.

First, while editing in Aperture with several hard drives hooked up to my laptop, my battery died. I had not noticed that the laptop wasn’t connected to the outlet, and when I got this message, I got nervous.

But I followed the advice, and all was well. (Holding down Command and Option when relaunching Aperture, rebuilds or reconstructs the database) Thanks Aperture.

Then, when visiting a fellow photographer I noticed the six hard drives on her desk and thought about the “archive problem” we all are facing. I’ve come to the realization that there is no perfect system, and there may never be one.

Though the cost per gigabyte continues to drop, our archives are continually growing and the need to safely store everything is a prime and ongoing concern for all digital photographers.

I’m realizing that I need to build into my budget a substantial amount of money to continually upgrade my storage, and it’s not cheap. I suspect there are a lot of us out there with a bunch of drives littering our desk. Personally, I’ve got 11. So I’m in the process of finding the time to completely go through my stuff and trim and edit and organize my entire digital collection, and it’s a daunting task, which Aperture makes less daunting.

For simplicity’s sake, I’m currently using managed libraries. I’m moving a bunch of older work from my gaggle of 250 giggers onto three 2Tb drives. I have multiple libraries, one for commercial work and others for major projects which each get their own library. They will all be “vaulted” twice, on two separate drives, one to be kept off-site. Remember that drives are meant to be fired up every once in a while, and it’s important to check that your back-up is still a back up.

It doesn’t get much easier than Aperture’s Managed Libray/Vault system which allows easy and fast back ups of your libraries. I have heard that the Aperture/Time Machine issue has been resolved with the latest Leopard update 10.5.3, meaning it will now back up your Aperture Library updating only new and altered files. But for myself, and I suspect many out there with multiple libraries and huge archives, Time Machine won’t be the answer.

As far as hardware, if you do research online you’ll quickly realize that even the most expensive drives fail. There is no one brand immune to failure. A friend suggested and I thought it wise: buy the cheapest you can find but get two at a time. The key to any back up system is redundancy. But if you’re superstitious or maybe just smart and always thinking doomsday scenario, don’t buy two from the same lot, or even the same manufacturer to avoid the impossible: two drives failing at the same time.

There are redundant back up systems like Drobo and many RAID 5 and 6 solutions out there, and they look like good ideas.

But for now, I’m keeping it simple, going with a RAID 1 CalDigit 2TB, which is essentially a 1TB drive, since RAID 1 mirrors two 1TB drives together, automatically duplicating whatever I put on one to the other. If there’s a failure, the two drive system allows easy replacement of the corrupted drive and a rebuilding onto the new one with no data loss. LaCie, G-Tech and others all make Raid 1 units with removable drives.

So my big plan is to get everything into Aperture, get rid of the fat, meaning any duplicates I don’t want, trim the libraries down and have my entire archive rated, and key-worded, with the five star selects getting backed up on their own and adding an online storage service into the mix. I have a dream.

When this is all completed (in my spare time) I will then take a hard look at RAID 5/6 or Drobo solutions, maybe moving from a managed to a referenced system and using back up software like SuperDuper, Synchronize Pro or ChronoSync.

But there’s no denying that hard drives, CD’s and DVD’s are only temporary solutions that will need to be updated every few years. There are new and exciting developments on the data storage horizon, that will likely replace the drives we use today, so don’t get too attached to your shiny, design driven hard drive. In the end, it’s disposable. Which brings me to another post for another time. How do you recycle or get rid of your older drives? Would you buy a used hard drive?