Back up!

[shovenose]

I work at a small local computer repair shop. We also sell refurbished computers and do ewaste recycling, but service is a big portion of it.
Anyway, the #1 reason customers are pissed off? They've lost their data.
Now, for somebody who checks their email and goes on facebook once a week, or watches a youtube video on cute cats once in a while, it's a minor inconvenience.

But for photographers or web designers or web app ui developers or programmers or writers or whatever, losing data can lose you millions, years, or your reputation.

So here's what I've found to be the best options. And don't just use one of these - combine more than one for the best chance of being able to get back upon your feet the fastest with the least data loss.

As long as your backups are all figured out, you'll never have a problem and never need to use them. The one time you forget to backup, your hard drive will fail. Such is life. But one can only try!

Backblaze - $5/month per computer for unlimited cloud backup. Unlike Carbonite or CrashPlan they have fast servers and cool people with brains. And a blog with awesome articles. And helpful, friendly support.

External hard drives - 1TB-2TB external hard drives are cheap. I highly recommend getting one that's USB 3.0 compliant because even if your computer only has USB 2.0 if you ever get a new computer, you won't need to buy a new drive. Oh, and USB 3.0 drives have faster controllers than older USB 2.0 external drives. Windows Vista and newer have perfectly good backup/restore systems. No need to buy other software to do that task.

Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box.com is basically online storage. you can sync folders and files across various computers and devices. I wouldn't recommend this for long term backups but if you simply want a file in more than one place, fast, and easily accessible, they're a good option.

Don't use USB flash drives as backup. Most/all USB flash drives, especially the really cheap ones, use flash memory that's been binned (meaning, rejected from usage in something like an SSD, which needs more performance and reliabily) for whatever reason. Yes, you're paying for marginal or defective storage that works just well enough to sell. Stick to brand name flash drives like SanDisk, Kingston, Lexar, Patriot, Corsair, etc. don't go for the no-name generic ones. Also, avoid the ones that colleges or businesses give out for free at seminars or press events - they're the same generic crap with a printed logo of the school/company/organization/whatever on it.

On your mobile device, all iOS, Android, and Windows Phone devices have built in backup. For Android, I'd highly recommend Lookout. The free version is sufficient but Premium is cheap and lets you back up even more and gives you additional anti-theft and security features.

Never store a single copy of a file in the cloud or your website, for no matter how short of a time. It's not any more or less reliable than a single hard drive in your computer. Oh, and RAID (redundant array of independent disks) does NOT COUNT AS BACKUP!!

Anyway, what other suggestions do you have, especially tailored to photographers?

 

[bratkinson]

As a former mainframe computer consultant that's done a fair share of PC based consulting and setups, I've witnessed first hand the difficulties in recovering from damaged or lost data files. One mainframe shop I worked at made backups every 6 hours of their master files and highly-active files and kept two concurrent log files of every online transaction. They even produced backup copies to be stored in a cave 30 miles away.

I've read and heard of small businesses, even medium city police department having a hard drive crash and they literally lost everything...customer account information, billing info, and the police lost mug shots, booking records, call records, and everything else on their un-backed up server, simply because they failed to do ANY backups! Such is the case with a number of friends of mine who know I (used to) build and fix computers other than my own and their computer won't boot up. Fortunately, other than a bunch of family pictures and emails, they chalk it up to 'old outdated computer' and simply buy another one, only to repeat the process 3-4 years later.

But for those for whom the contents of their computer are their livelihood, having adequate backups is imperative. Having ENOUGH and in the right places is paramount. While RAID drives allow for some degree of semi-automatic recovery in the event of a drive failure, the intricracies of building, using, and recovering RAID and it's various options may be difficult for many users to understand, especially if it's a once in a great-while need.

As Shovenose indicated above, simple external USB hard drives are often the easiest to use. All that's required is to copy the folder(s) of the photos and other information you wish to preserve to the external USB drive(s). You may decide to keep one 'set' of backups at home, for immediate recovery in case of a crash or "OH Noooooo!!! I DELETED THE WRONG FOLDER!!!". I've done that more than a few times! As recently as last week, trying to free up some space on my SSD, no less! I also keep a backup USB drive off site, about a mile and a half from home. In times past, I kept the off site backup in my desk at work. Why an off site backup? Fire. Theft. Tornado.

Fortunately, the cost of computer hardware has gotten incredibly cheap. 25 years ago, when I 'upgraded', a 20 MEGABYTE RLL disk drive was about $300! Today, an external 1TB drive (50x bigger!) is less than $100! I've finally gotten to the point where I want to move some 'long term storage' out of my computer and into multiple external drives. Why multiple? Because some where, some time, the 'number will come up' and one of the drives will fail. Guaranteed!

 

[robbins.photo]

I work at a small local computer repair shop. We also sell refurbished computers and do ewaste recycling, but service is a big portion of it.
Anyway, the #1 reason customers are pissed off? They've lost their data.
Now, for somebody who checks their email and goes on facebook once a week, or watches a youtube video on cute cats once in a while, it's a minor inconvenience.

But for photographers or web designers or web app ui developers or programmers or writers or whatever, losing data can lose you millions, years, or your reputation.

So here's what I've found to be the best options. And don't just use one of these - combine more than one for the best chance of being able to get back upon your feet the fastest with the least data loss.

As long as your backups are all figured out, you'll never have a problem and never need to use them. The one time you forget to backup, your hard drive will fail. Such is life. But one can only try!

Backblaze - $5/month per computer for unlimited cloud backup. Unlike Carbonite or CrashPlan they have fast servers and cool people with brains. And a blog with awesome articles. And helpful, friendly support.

External hard drives - 1TB-2TB external hard drives are cheap. I highly recommend getting one that's USB 3.0 compliant because even if your computer only has USB 2.0 if you ever get a new computer, you won't need to buy a new drive. Oh, and USB 3.0 drives have faster controllers than older USB 2.0 external drives. Windows Vista and newer have perfectly good backup/restore systems. No need to buy other software to do that task.

Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box.com is basically online storage. you can sync folders and files across various computers and devices. I wouldn't recommend this for long term backups but if you simply want a file in more than one place, fast, and easily accessible, they're a good option.

Don't use USB flash drives as backup. Most/all USB flash drives, especially the really cheap ones, use flash memory that's been binned (meaning, rejected from usage in something like an SSD, which needs more performance and reliabily) for whatever reason. Yes, you're paying for marginal or defective storage that works just well enough to sell. Stick to brand name flash drives like SanDisk, Kingston, Lexar, Patriot, Corsair, etc. don't go for the no-name generic ones. Also, avoid the ones that colleges or businesses give out for free at seminars or press events - they're the same generic crap with a printed logo of the school/company/organization/whatever on it.

On your mobile device, all iOS, Android, and Windows Phone devices have built in backup. For Android, I'd highly recommend Lookout. The free version is sufficient but Premium is cheap and lets you back up even more and gives you additional anti-theft and security features.

Never store a single copy of a file in the cloud or your website, for no matter how short of a time. It's not any more or less reliable than a single hard drive in your computer. Oh, and RAID (redundant array of independent disks) does NOT COUNT AS BACKUP!!

Anyway, what other suggestions do you have, especially tailored to photographers?

Hmm.. ok, so I need 1 TB external drives eh? Cool. Any idea where I can get 46 of those really really cheap so I can backup my system - lol? Seriously though it's a good post and a good thought and for most folks external drives are cheap enough that they make a feasible method for backup.

One other thought RAID array the way many people use it, Raid 0 most certainly doesn't count as a backup. It counts more as a "keep you fingers crossed" because it actually increases the odds your going to loose data over a single hard drive. A properly maintained Raid Level 5 or Level 6 is not something I would call a true "backup" however if one drive fails odds are very good that you'll be able to recover everything, and the odds of more than a single drive failing without external influence is pretty remote. I still encourage people to backup raid's of course, but really the biggest downfall I usually see is not so much the Raid system itself it's that people really didn't understand when they set it up as Raid 0 that they may have gotten some faster access times but their data was actually more at risk then it was before.

 

[shovenose]

RAID0 shouldn't even be called RAID. It actually gives you double the chances of losing data.
Other RAID schemes still don't count as backup. RAID cards can fail, arrays can become corrupt.
Besides, if you a delete a file, it's gone. Not the point of backup!

 

[480sparky]

RAID0 shouldn't even be called RAID. It actually gives you double the chances of losing data.
Other RAID schemes still don't count as backup. RAID cards can fail, arrays can become corrupt.
Besides, if you a delete a file, it's gone. Not the point of backup!

I visited a friend who had just set up a RAID system. He had it setting on a shelf next to his computer. He was 'new-daddy' proud of his new back-up system. Said, "Look, I can hot-swap any of the drives any time. I got 6 bays for 6 drives.... they can be any size. I'm never gonna lose any files ever again!"

I dead-panned, "So, what happens when your house burns down?"


I could see the wheels in his head turning.