Imaging Tip: Protecting Your Digital Photos With a RAID

IMAGING TIP: Protecting your digital photos with a RAID
by Rich Seiling

What is the biggest problem with digital photography that we pretend doesn’t exist? It's that all digital storage devices not only CAN fail, but rather, WILL fail at some point in time. If you aren’t implementing a robust strategy to protect your data, you are only a millisecond away from losing everything on your hard drive forever.

The cost of this loss is so much more than the cost of the hard drive--the reality is that you can’t recreate original digital pictures, or most of the other data you store on your hard drive.

When you abandon film for digital, you are taking on the responsibility and expense to store and preserve your files, and that requires more than it did with film. You can store your film in a filing cabinet with archival materials and have a really good chance that it will still be useable 25 or 50 years from now. If you expect hard drives to be as simple and reliable as film, you will someday suffer greatly from your inaccurate expectations.

Ideally, you already make regular backups with at least three separate copies of your important data stored in separate, secure locations. Experience tells me you probably don’t, but you should.

A proper backup scheme is essential, but there are still risks...what if your hard drive fails before you can back it up? A backup is only good when it is up-to-date...and the second you change a file or add a new file, its out-of-date. Murphy’s Law says the most likely time for your hard drive to fail is just after you’ve transferred all the files from your week long-trip, and have deleted the memory cards.

Ideally, we’d never have a hard drive failure that requires us to use a backup. That's where a RAID comes into the picture. A RAID provides another level of data redundancy - i.e. protection - in the case of a major failure.

What is a RAID?
RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. The idea is to store copies of your data across multiple disks, so if one drive fails, you can still access your data, because a redundant copy is stored on another disk in the RAID. This process is controlled by a RAID controller, which can be either hardware or software. The best part is that it automatically maintains these duplicate copies in real time.

There are many forms of RAID, but the type that I think is most beneficial and easy to use for the average photographer is called RAID Type 1, also known as a mirrored RAID.

A mirrored RAID uses two physical hard drives to maintain a real time, continuous duplicate of your data. On your computer you’ll see one volume, but every time you write to that volume, it makes two copies of your file. Think of it as digital carbon paper.

It works like this: You take two hard drives of equal size--let’s say 500 GB each--and attach them to your computer. Then, by using a RAID controller, you can tell the computer to make these drives into a Mirrored RAID (RAID Type 1). From then on, the computer will only show you one volume that is 500 GB in size, but when you write a file to that volume, it will write the file to both drives. Both drives are an exact duplicate of each other.

Now, if one of the two drives should fail, the RAID controller will warn you of the failure, then will automatically start using the duplicate drive that has not failed. This means you will still be able to access your data, and you should not lose anything. It's brilliant!

If you are on a Mac, a great way to create a RAID is with a product called SoftRaid. This software quickly and easily lets you implement a mirrored RAID, and offers more features than Apple’s built-in RAID driver. SoftRaid makes it easy to plug in two external hard drives and use them as a RAID. Another compelling feature of SoftRaid is that the data on a mirrored hard drive is written in such a way that any computer can access it without using the RAID controller. This isn’t always true of dedicated hardware RAID controllers, or RAID levels other than RAID Type 1. This can offer you more recovery options in an absolute worst-case scenario.

There are similar solutions for Windows users, and some versions of Windows have built-in support for RAID (called Dynamic disks). I’ve been an Apple guy since before there was Windows, so you’ll have to do your own research if you want to build a Windows RAID. It is very possible...I’m just not the guy to tell you exactly how.

In addition to software controllers, there are also Hardware RAID controllers. HighPoint Technologies offers some elegant solutions with its Rocket RAID cards.

There are countless options for every need, but for most photographers, a simple software based RAID Type 1 is a great first step, and will likely provide you with more protection than you have now. Of course, you should learn all you can about using and maintaining a RAID because your images are at stake. The SoftRaid manual (Adobe pdf) is a great primer on the subject.

Hopefully, this tip shows you the need for a RAID, and points you to a solution. It’s up to you to make it work, or hire someone to do it for you. Your photographs depend on it.