Backing up the family photo archive

Last winter I finally sat down to deal with the photo archive. Twenty years of pictures were spread over two old laptops, a few memory cards and a drawer full of USB sticks. Nothing was lost yet, but nothing was safe either.

The plan is boring on purpose: one folder per year, files named by capture date, and three copies in total. One lives on a small network drive at home, one on an external disk that stays in a different room, and one is an encrypted archive stored away from the house.

Sorting took a weekend. A short script renamed everything from the embedded timestamps, and a checksum list made it easy to spot duplicates. About a fifth of the collection turned out to be copies of the same files.

The part people skip is the restore test. Once a quarter I pick a random folder from the offsite copy, unpack it somewhere temporary and open a few files. It takes ten minutes and it is the only way to know the backup actually works.

Total cost was one disk and a couple of evenings. The archive now grows by a single folder each year, and I no longer worry about a dead laptop.