As digital photographers, we live in constant fear of the crash. It’s not a matter of IF, but WHEN. The crash is inevitable. At some point, one of your precious hard drives will head down the dark path of no return, taking gigabytes upon gigabytes of precious data with it. Obsessively backing up our work is a part of our craft. None of us wants to be the guy that loses someone’s wedding photos, or the client’s $100,000 advertising shoot. So, let’s assume for a moment that we are well-invested in redundancy, that our images are as safe as they could possibly be: on two separate hard disks residing in separate geographical locations in case of fire, and all images also backed up to DVD, deposited into a safety deposit box in Switzerland with an armed guard detail.
Your. Images. Are. Safe.
And yet, I constantly receive this sort of thing in my inbox:
Matt,
My hard drive crashed and I’ve lost all of my email messages. Can you please send me my download URLs for the TTG galleries I’ve purchased?
Thanks,
Sad Photographer
Luckily, I have records of such things. But I’m guessing that Mr. or Mrs. Sad Photographer lost a lot more than TTG download links, and those other things are probably not so easily recovered.
What frustrates me most about receiving these messages is not the inconvenience of having to look up old transaction records, but the knowledge that this loss could easily have been prevented. Here’s the cold, hard fact dear readers:
Your computer is the WORST place to keep your email.
And if that’s not a fact, then it’s certainly my opinion.
As independent photographers, you are also small business owners. Consider what passes through your email on a daily basis: correspondence with clients, job invoices, purchase receipts, bids, bid requests, image proofs, processing instructions, print orders and very important messages from The Turning Gate. Other possibilities may include bank statements, accounting and other transaction records, sweet messages from your partner, cute things from your kids and all manner of things better not lost in system failure.
A few years ago, I bought my parents a new Mac. Previously, they’d been using an old PC and checking their email via Thunderbird. I setup Thunderbird on the new Mac in order to move the old mail over, which amounted to more than 2GB of saved messages. Two gigabytes(!!) of hard disk space being needlessly consumed. Two gigabytes of data that first had to be exported, and then had to be imported onto the new machine. Two gigabytes of data that might have been lost had that old PC decided to die, and I tell you it was near death’s door at the time. Two gigabytes of data that will only increase in size over time with new emails received and saved, and which will only become a greater liability as it grows, and even more of a pain to preserve or move to the eventual next computer.
I feel I’m becoming long-winded, and so I’ll state my point:
Cloud-based email services can save your bacon and also save you headache, heartache and frustration.
Of all the cloud-based email services on the web, Google’s Gmail is by far my favorite. Google’s Gmail service offers vast amounts of storage, a unique approach to organization, one of the best e-mail-searching features around, and access to all your e-mail from any Web browser—all for the low, low price of free.
The many advantages should be clear. Email messages are not consuming vast portions of my local hard disk, are not in danger of being lost when my hard disk inevitably dies, do not have to be moved when I buy a new computer, can be checked from any computer, any where, or even from my phone. And I promise you that Google takes better care of its servers than you do of your computer, and so your messages are reliably hosted with redundancy and regular maintenance. You can even use your Gmail account to check, collect and store messages from your other email accounts.
Take it to heart, folks. Get a Gmail account, and stop losing your messages in catastrophic system failures. There’s no reason I or anyone should ever have to receive an email from Sad Photographer.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Funny that I get exactly the same email regularly.
I do backup my user folder too.
Great post Matt – feeling distinctly smug about my gmail account right now… am now feeling paranoid that I don’t have the dvd back up thing in switzerland – will have to look into that.
Very important post Matt! I preach backups to so many people, yet some of those same people have come back to me with dead hard drives and big frowns…without a backup.
My photography is stored on multiple hard drives and 2 sets of DVDs (one off-site), but I’m also a huge proponent of backing up ALL of my computer data. I use SuperDuper to keep an updated clone of my internal drives, but other friends use Carbon Copy Cloner as well. The clones have saved me more than once.
As for email, I totally agree with the cloud storage, but I also have all of my gmail (since 2004!) backed up on my computer which takes up about 3.5 GB. Why do I do this? 1) 3.5GB is hardly a dent in a 500GB hard drive and 2) because I use email just like any other database and I want to have that database at my fingertips whether I’m online or not. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve mined important files from my email for reference or work reasons.
I’m also not ready to put complete trust in the cloud.