I recently decided to professionalize my backup (and recovery) workflow for digital photography. Even though I'm just a hobbyist, I come from an IT background and decided a professional workflow is not very hard or expensive to realize for the end-user. Maybe some steps are overkill, but I hope it can be of some help to other people who don't have much experience in this area.
Hardware and media prerequisites:
- Cardreader (can of course also be camera usb connection)
- Computer harddisk (single disk, no raid)
- Synology NAS (single disk, no raid - stored in the basement)
- External 2.5" USB harddrive
- DVD burner
- blank DVD media brand A
- blank DVD media brand B
Software prerequisites:
- Adobe Lightroom
- Synology Data Replicator 3
- 7-zip
- QuickPar
Stage 1 - Import (frequency: manual):
Reading the CF card into my lightroom catalog.
CR2 files get stored on my local disk.
Lightroom catalog is updated on local disk
Stage 2 - Workstation backup (frequency: every 4 hours):
Lightroom Catalog and files on disk are backup up to Synology NAS.
Synology Data Replicator is used for this on file level.
Lightroom also creates a backup of the catalog on my OS disk which is also backed up in this stage.
Stage 3 - Server backup (frequency: once a week on sunday at 0:00)
Synology backup storage is backed up to the USB disk connected to the NAS. The USB disk has to be connected manually (or left connected).
Stage 4 - Archive (frequency: every year).
This stage is slightly irregular; I manually generated subdirectories of 4.5 GB each, place these in subfolders per 4 (labelled A-Z) and add 25% of PAR2 files (using quickpar) to this. This gives me a set of 5 DVD's for every 18 GB (A1 to A5, B1 - B5 etc). If one of the four data DVDs fails completely, it can be recovered using the parity disk.
Since my current backup spanned a total of around 100 GB, this gave me 30 DVD disks in total. I stored these in a spindle in my parents' basement.
Still not 100% decided on the last step since it was VERY time consuming, but then again, this was 2 1/2 years worth of images (2008 - 2010) stored in one go. For the next backup run I'll just do the increment of everything after 2010 only.
After the archive step I created a new lightroom catalog for 2011. I removed the old catalog from the backup process, but it's still present on my local drive and on the USB drive (as well as on the DVD's).
Discussion
My imaging process (from camera to post processing) has a few single points of failure. Since I don't own a camera with dual card slots, the CF card in my body is basically a high risk area. For now this is an acceptable risk to me.
I also only have one body, so if anything goes wrong during the shooting, I'm also screwed - although for weddings I borrow or rent an additional body.
In the event of fire or theft, I spread the risk by putting the NAS in another room, but in a heavy fire it's likely to still die too. I considered this and decided I'd have bigger problems then. The archive is likely to be safe.
I might script the archive step to automatically span dvd files and generate a par2 for every 18GB in the future. It doesn't necessarily need to be every year, can also be every 18Gb of CR2 data.
Pros
- Short term, medium term and long term backup process.
- Low cost (I already had the NAS, USB disks are around €100 for like 1TB - easily worth it to me).
- Data is stored relatively securely.
- DVD's have a 1 in 5 redundancy.
- A NAS is great to work with in backup and recovery.
Cons
- A few single points of failure (in-camera, CF card readout, NAS and workstation are in the same building, USB disk is usually also in the same building)
- Eats up a LOT of storage on my NAS (around 180GB with max 3 versions of a file).
- This is quit a complex process
- The archive stage is VERY time consuming, but it does give me the option to clean up.
- Burning 30 DVD's at 4x speed with verify sucks.
Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions 
