Mac Backup on the Road

One of the most vulnerable times for a photographer to suffer computer issues or data loss is on the road. This is also where photographers are rarely backed up.

We are creatures of habit. Get on location, setup, shoot, drop images into the laptop, edit, get the selects to the client, break everything down, job well done.

But once in a while the unexpected happens. Just like we plan for hardware failure with backup cameras, and extra flash and more than one memory card and camera battery, your laptop has the ability to fail, too. The most likely part of your laptop to fail unexpectedly is the hard drive. So backing it up is important... and if you are a Mac user, relatively simple.

The first thing to look at is how much junk you have on your laptop. I am a firm believer in keeping a laptop slim with only the things you need to get the job done. I don’t save a lot of photos, games, or a library of every QuickTime movie I’ve ever downloaded on the laptop... I waste the hard drive space on my desktop computer for things like that!

As soon as I get back to my office from a shoot, I move the photos off my laptop and onto my desktop system which then gets it started in my archiving system so I know it is backed up and protected.

By limiting what I keep on the laptop, it also makes it easier to back it up. My backup solution is simple. I have an external portable firewire hard drive... portable drives are the ones that run off the firewire cable and require no A/C Power. The MacBook and MacBook Pro will also boot off of a USB2 drive... but running a machine off of a USB drive is a slow and frustrating experience... stick with firewire.

It is also true that portable hard drives are more expensive and offer less storage than the desktop variety hard drive, but remember, you are buying this to use with a laptop. Portable drives are powered off the firewire connection to the computer and they are much smaller, meaning you don't need to fire somewhere to plug it in and it will fit in your laptop bag. You can be thrifty and buy a full sized hard drive, but you are not going to enjoy dragging it around in your bag and always be searching for a plug when you need to use it.

I normally use SuperDuper to make the backup of the hard drive. SuperDuper creates a perfect bootable clone of my hard drive and also allows you to do synchronized backups after the first full backup. (This means that instead of it backing up the entire drive every time you back up, you have the option to only update the things that have changed since the last backup... saving boatloads of time.)

*Note - SuperDuper is now 10.5 compatible.

If you are using an Intel based Mac, there are ways you can back up your Windows partition, too... but that's a topic for another time.

Regardless of which software you use to create your backup, make sure that you select the option to make a bootable backup. That way, if you need to boot from the external drive, you power down your Mac, plug it in, hold down the “Option” button while booting up, select the external drive, and you are back in business.

The other reason having a bootable backup is to repair your main hard drive if it starts acting weird when you are on the road. You can boot up from the external and run the disk utility or other fixit programs on the main drive and hopefully be able to repair it. If you can't, no big deal, just clone your backup back over to your main drive and you are back with a working OS again.

Assuming that you keep your laptop slimmed down without a bunch of extra unnecessary stuff, you should only need to update the backup every month or so to account for software upgrades.

Another thing that I would suggest is create two partitions on the external drive so you can use the extra partition as an alternate storage location for images. If you use a program like PhotoMechanic, you can set it to import the images to a folder on your main hard drive and to copy them to the second partition on the external drive at the same time. That way you have an immediate backup of the files.

If I am shooting out of town, I usually store my external drive separately from my laptop after I've loaded my shoot in it so that if my laptop bag gets stolen, at least I have all my images backed up safely somewhere else (like in my camera bag.) If you keep the external drive with your laptop and it disappears or gets run over by a bus or something... you are hosed.

So remember to backup your laptop and have fun if you make it to MacWorld... I'm home hanging out with the twins.