Stay away from commercial pay-for backup and restore programs. At least one commercial exception is the free version of Veeam, which I use to backup and restore the OS disk. The free version of Veeam doesn’t require you to go hunting for your product registration key when you attempt to restore on new hardware, assuming your old hardware died. (The same can hold true on same hardware where you only replaced your hard drive.) It is a major pain to not have your product registration key available to you when you are trying to perform a restore. You probably won’t. In this situation, many years may have pass buy and folks may not remember where they stored the key. It’s even possible for some people to never find the key. In that case, those folks have lost access to their data forever, unless the company is willing to give you a key for free. Otherwise, you have to buy the software a second time and hope the newest version (which could be 8 years newer) is still compatible with the old version’s database format (should be). Feels a little like ransomware doesn’t it?

Free software is fine as long as it has a good reputation. rsync and Grsync come to mind.

For photography, I just want replicas of my files… in a flat file system. Good old NTFS, … you know, the standard Windows, or Mac, or Linux file system. I don’t want a software front end and backup and restore pitfalls between me and my images.

~[Editorial: I mirror but I don’t recommend mirroring to others. Instead I recommend just regular copies. See why in the disclaimer below. A mirror is just a replica but it is different technically than just copying files. A mirror will also delete deleted files. That’s what I want but it is dangerous and prone to user error. Instead, just copy them and keep all versions on the second and third drives. This way nothing gets deleted by accident. It’s messy but safer.]~

So I mirror the photography drives onto other drives, two others, and keep one at an off site location and rotate it in and out. When one drive fails, no problem. Just buy a new drive and mirror one of the other two and I’m back in business. No backup and restore software to deal with at all.

Why? Because Raw images are already compressed, and so are Jpegs, and Tiffs don’t compress well. There is nothing to be gained by compression used in standard backup/restore software… and much to be lost… namely access.

For windows I actually use Robocopy for photography data. It’s included with the OS and if you do your research you’d probably find what I did, that Robocopy is the most robust file copying program out there. And it can perform the copies while the system is in use, etc. Highly reliable. And then, as a front end for Robocopy, I use RoboMirror. RoboMirror makes Robocopy easier to use. Otherwise, Robocopy has no front end of its own.

A warning / disclaimer about mirroring A mirror of your data is not a backup. It is just an exact copy. What this means is that there will be no way to backup different versions of the same file over time. It also means that your pictures are susceptible to user-error. Mirroring also mirrors deleted files, meaning, if a file is missing from the source, and it exists on a target, the deletion will be replicated on the target. This means that you have to be damned sure that the data you are copying from has the full set of files because if not, you may be unknowingly deleting any files that exist on the target but that don’t exist on the source drive. If that’s what you want, then it is fine. Just make sure the source drive has the full complement of files before you do a restore operation. I do this by making sure the source and target sizes are about the same, wherein the difference in size is explainable by the new files on the source drive.

This is what I want because it deletes deleted files that just take up space. But again I don’t recommend it for others because of the potential pitfalls. For others I recommend regular copies. RoboMirror allows for this, i.e., copying and not mirroring; it’s just a check box.

Here’s an example of a disaster that, while it wouldn’t happen with backup and restore software, it would happen with mirroring (and why I recommend copying instead of mirroring). Let’s say you have a software-related error on your photography drive. Let’s also say the error wipes out half of the photos you’ve ever taken. Further, let’s say you aren’t aware of it. You update a few photos no problem. Then you do a mirror (not a backup, nor a straight copy of the new files). What would happen? You will have just wiped out half of the photos on your backup drive. Your only hope then is to realize what’s happened and restore everything from the third drive.