In last week's blog post, I mentioned that I was done talking about storage of photo libraries. I lied. Over the course of the last seven days, I've had dozens of conversations with photographers about storage. Even at the end of Macworld, when I settled in for a tea with Derrick Story and George Jardine, one of the big topics of conversation around the table was storage. It turns out that there's more to talk about and Lightroom users everywhere are really trying to work through the various storage issues that come up when shooting zillions of RAW files. So, this week, I'm going to talk a bit more about my own workflow for storing offsite backups.

When talking about making backups to store offsite—in my case, in a bank safe deposit box—many folks assumed that the best way to accomplish this would be to use an external FireWire or USB drives for this purpose. I used to do this, but I don't anymore. Instead, I use bare hard drives. They're usually cheaper and they take up a lot less space which is important when you're storing data in a small space. And, not having to store and make sure I know where the power adapters are for the external drives has been a blessing as well. The only trick to this approach is that you need a way to get data on your bare hard drives.

There are several options for doing this. The first option is that you can open up your computer and swap drives in and out. The downside to this approach is that you have to shutdown and restart your machine every time you want to do this. A second option is to use an external disk enclosure that supports FireWire or USB, with the downside of having to open up the enclosure every time you want to swap drives. It works, but it's still tedious. For a while, I looked for an enclosure that I could easily slide hard drives in and out of, but then I found a better solution in the form of a USB to SATA adapter cable that provides both power and a connection to either full size or laptop SATA drives. It's really elegant. Here's what it looks like when I have a drive hooked up for copying files:

Then, when I'm done copying files to the disk and it's time for the disk to go off to the safe deposit box, I just put it in an antistatic bag and then walk it over to the bank.

I was going to try to get a photo of my drives in the safe deposit box, but my bank wasn't so hot on that idea. So, I'll just have to let you imagine several plastic bag wrapped hard drives in a safe deposit box.

The particular USB to SATA adapter I'm using is no longer available, but NewerTech has a more recent version of it in the form of their USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter. There are other devices like this on the market as well. I don't have a particular recommendation, but I can say that having this kind of cable around has been very handy for a variety of purposes in addition to backing up photo libraries.

The downside to a USB adapter is that backups run at USB speed which, as you know, is quite a bit slower than you can get from a SATA drive. So far, this hasn't be a huge problem for me, but given that I've got a few slots free on my eSATA adapter card, I may soon purchase an eSATA to SATA adapter cable so that i can connect my backup hard drives with a direct connection and run them at full speed. If that option is available to you, I'd recommend you go that direction.

There's another way you can do offsite backups which I've been evaluating for a while, and which has also come up in the comments to previous posts. That's to store files online using services such as Amazon S3, Mozy, and others. I'll have more to say about that next week. Apparently, I'm not done talking about storage yet.