What’s a reliable home backup workflow for a large photo library?

Never backup just at home. All backup solutions have some chance of failure including the loss, theft, fire, floods and natural disasters. There should be two copies in two different physical locations at all times. So, even if you make the backups at home, be prepared to take one elsewhere. Mine duplicates go in a safe at the bank.

For the highest volumes of data, you want hard-disk based solutions. If you can afford high-capacity SSDs, even better since they are much more reliable and sturdy. Keep in mind the cost difference is sometimes more than 10X, depending on the capacity.

The workflow is simple:

1. Copy your images to your primary backup location. This should be a read-write location as you do your filtering there.
2. Review and delete images not worth keeping.

3. Copy to your secondary backup device using a synchronization tool which just copies new and changed files between two devices.

   On Linux: rsync -Sax source target

4. Bring secondary backup device to secure off-site location.

5. From off-site location, bring back the previous secondary backup.
6. Repeat from step 1 as needed.

My workflow is slightly difference since I use optical disks (Presently DVDs but transitioning to Blu-Ray) at the offsite location which is safe at the bank. In this case, there is an intermediate step to fragment data into blocks of 4.5GB for DVDs or 22 GB for Blu-Ray.

More options and considerations are described in an article about backing up digital media which I wrote about 2 years ago.