Backup Strategy

[WhiskeyTango]

........There are several ways of doing this. Carbonite and Mozy both offer good solutions. There's other ways of accomplishing this as well, but those are the easiest.

I have a simple method. My work is backed up on two external drives (these are in addition to my 4-drive backup routine). One is kept at a neighbors house. This prevents me from losing everything in case my house burns down, a thief cleans me out, something like that. But it's not fool-proof when it comes to floods, tornadoes, large local disasters like that.

So a second copy is kept at a relative's house 872 miles away. Now, unless we have something like this happen, I think I'm fairly safe. And if we do, then I doubt I'd care about my stuff any more.

Now that's a strategy I love.

Out of curiosity, how often do you refresh the backup 872 miles away? My in-laws have a place about 4 hours from me that I get to every couple of months, hell in hunting season I'm there every weekend . I could definitely keep a 3rd backup there...

 

[480sparky38 37]

Now that's a strategy I love.

Out of curiosity, how often do you refresh the backup 872 miles away? My in-laws have a place about 4 hours from me that I get to every couple of months, hell in hunting season I'm there every weekend . I could definitely keep a 3rd backup there...

 

[Gaerek]

People have given you all sorts of ideas and you always go back to your original plan.

Whoa, hang on. Not at all. My "original plan" was to ditch the 2Gb external in favor of a 2nd array, swapping an array element weekly.

I've definitely taken the advice given to heart. Now my plan is to skip the 2nd array and simply swap out a set of 2Gb external drives.

I'm still VERY open to refinement, criticism, etc. I don't ask questions on subjects that I'm closed minded on. I apologize if I gave another impression.

Your point on spending for backup is also taken to heart. I've got damn near 20k invested in this "hobby" now. I don't mind spending money for a robust backup solution, I simply want to spend wisely and not foolishly.

Noted.

I may have misunderstood. I have ~10 years experience in IT dealing with backups and different things like that. In an enterprise environment, backups are so vitally important (and usually required by law to meet certain specifications, etc) that money is no object. But then again, when your potential loss is in the millions of $'s for losing data, you can afford expensive solutions.

Consumers, on the other hand, want a cheap solution. But they also want it easy to set up and use, as well as be robust. This is impossible. My recommendation is to spend as much on a solution as you can reasonably afford. If your budget is $100, well, you're looking at basically a single external hard drive and that's about it. I'm not sure what your budget is, or if you've even thought about it.

I seem to be pushing Drobo, but they really are an excellent solution. If you're worried about the actual unit failing, they have some really amazing warranty offerings. Basically, if the unit fails, they'll ship another one to you express the day you call, so you'll be back up and running with only a loss of a couple days. They are certainly spendy, but again, what's your data worth? Anyway, they are one of many options out there, but for someone who wants an easy, robust solution, there aren't many other options out there.

 

[Gaerek]

........There are several ways of doing this. Carbonite and Mozy both offer good solutions. There's other ways of accomplishing this as well, but those are the easiest.

I have a simple method. My work is backed up on two external drives (these are in addition to my 4-drive backup routine). One is kept at a neighbors house. This prevents me from losing everything in case my house burns down, a thief cleans me out, something like that. But it's not fool-proof when it comes to floods, tornadoes, large local disasters like that.

So a second copy is kept at a relative's house 872 miles away. Now, unless we have something like this happen, I think I'm fairly safe. And if we do, then I doubt I'd care about my stuff any more.

How do you back it up? Are you able to remotely back up? Or do you have to send disc/drives? I used to send a DVD a month to my in-laws in Arizona, but I just use a commercial off-site solution now.

 

[Garbz]

Garbz, I love the idea of doing a sync between the two backup volumes rather than a full copy over. My only concern with that is that it puts both volumes, along with the primary drive, all in the same location at the same time. Since all of my volumes are the same size, I wonder if I'd be safer to swap the volumes at the offsite location and then sync the stale backup drive to the current working drive. Seems like I'd accomplish the same thing without ever putting all of my backups under one roof...

There's a risk reward case here. A few simple things can make this not a problem for you. Statistically speaking you're not likely to deal with a full house fire or flood or things like that. Unless you live in central Africa you're also not likely to suffer continuous sustained lightning strikes. Most data loss results from user error and failure of mechanical parts. For the user error, don't use the computer while doing the backup.

At this point unless you're backing up nuclear launch codes you should be relatively safe. You get to a point as with everything else where to reduce your risk you start having to have considerable expense. You could do the backup remotely but at that point it's either out of your control, or the system is online for sustained periods which may open it to it's own failures. This is something I do at home. It's not a remote backup but it is another computer, but since the other computer also always runs the last hardware failure I had was actually on that machine. I still have a separate backup though.


You could use dual disks for backups and alternate them every other week. So one day bring in one disk and do a full mirror, then the next week bring in the other. That way if you really suffer a bad catastrophe, your backups are only 1 week old.

 

[480sparky38 37]

............How do you back it up? Are you able to remotely back up? Or do you have to send disc/drives? I used to send a DVD a month to my in-laws in Arizona, but I just use a commercial off-site solution now.

All my backing up / file copying is done on my desk. I physically move the drives from their storage location to my desk.

 

[unpopular]

If you are a professional, you should consider placing your backup on a server which is located outside of your main area, such as in a detached garage or storage shed, or (and perhaps better) use an online backup service. The reason for this is because if there is ever a fire you do not loose everything.

In the very least, archive old full hard drives in a safe location or fireproof safe.

 

[480sparky38 37]

If you are a professional, you should consider placing your backup on a server which is located outside of your main area, such as in a detached garage or storage shed, or (and perhaps better) use an online backup service. The reason for this is because if there is ever a fire you do not loose everything.

In the very least, archive old full hard drives in a safe location or fireproof safe.

"Fireproof" safes will not always protect hard drives in a fire. Yes, they may prevent combustion, but they cannot prevent heat damage.

 

[unpopular]

I was thinking that after I posted. It's very much not the best idea.

I had a boss that lost everything in a fire. I suggested that he have a local server and a RAID mirror in a storage shed he had in back. You'd think he would have listened, but he refused and insisted on keeping everything in disorganized mess of DVD's. Some people just don't learn I guess.

 

[TCampbell]

I have no idea where to put this, so if I'm in the wrong place, I'm counting on the mods to move me... (apologies in advance)

I'm considering a backup strategy involving a 2 drive RAID 1 array. I'm thinking about buying (3) 2Tb drives, (2) of which will be in the array at any point in time, while the 3rd is in a safe deposit box offsite. On a periodic basis (weekly/bi-weekly/monthly, etc.), I'd pull (1) of the drives in the array and swap it for the one in the safe deposit box, then rebuild the mirror.

Thoughts?

That's not how RAID 1 works. RAID 1 is "simple mirroring". Meaning that it behaves as though you really own a single drive and anything written to disk 1 is also written to disk 2. You cannot just unplug one of the drives to throw put in storage and pop another drive in... you'll break the mirroring and then the array will have to spend hours rebuilding the integrity of the RAID 1 filesystem.

RAID 1 is simple and usually inexpensive. But since you buy 2 disks but only get to use the storage space of 1 disk, it has 50% overhead. A RAID 5 system (which is more expensive) gives you N-1 effective storage space for N disks. E.g. if you have 4 disks, then you get to use the capacity of 3 of them. You're data really is spread across all 4, but it's spread in a way that if any single disk fails the array can continue to operate in "degraded" mode. You get to replace the failed disk and the array will then rebuild the integrity of the filesystem (and you can continue to use it in degraded mode while it does this -- it will take hours and hours to complete.)



I use a different approach. I have 3 different backups. I have a Mac

1) The Mac uses "time machine" (this is the built-in backup system on the mac). It backs up the machine using an incremental backup once per hour. You can restore any file to any point in time. This is important (and has saved my bacon more than once.)

2) I use a disk cloning backup called "Super Duper". It essentially just creates a clone of your hard drive and then maintains the clone each time it runs. It looks for any files that have changed since the last backup and applies those changes. Effectively you end up with what appears to be a full disk backup but it creates this in the amount of time necessary to do an incremental backup. The upside is that if my computer crashes, I can actually boot and run off this cloned drive. The downside is it's not an incremental backup.

3) I also create FileVault backups (this is a built-in feature of Aperture) and these are external disks that I detach and store. It only backs up my images. It is also NOT an incremental backup.

Why incremental?

A while ago I had a drive fail... but not all at once. It was a slow gradual failure. Basically the drive started to lose it's accuracy in aligning with specific tracks. The access arm that positions the head over a specific track was getting sloppy. This meant that as it would "write" data, it was bleeding some data onto adjacent tracks and damaging whatever files happened to be stored there... but I didn't know it was doing this. One day I went to open an image that I hadn't touch in about a year and discovered it was damaged and wouldn't render correctly. I tried to restore the file from backup, but since the drive was failing "gradually", several backups had actually occurred AFTER the damage was done. That means that even my BACKUP images were damaged.

If not for the fact that I used Time Machine as an incremental backup solution, all would have been lost. I told Time Machine to go back a week at a time and re-inspected the images... it turns out I had to go back about 1 month before I could find a backup where none of the images were damaged. I was REALLY glad I kept multiple backups which included incremental backups with a long history.

 

[bratkinson]

Being a former mainframe IT consultant, I can readily affirm the necessity of not only HAVING a regular backup schedule, but also having restore capability immediately at hand, if needed. One regional bank I worked at kept a continuous log of all online activity/updating, 7-day cycle of 8 hour major-file backups on site, and kept duplicate 24 hour backups, one on site, the other, about 20 miles away in a secure facility. Losing track of someones' or some companys' money is NOT an option.

For the professional photographer, a regular backup schedule and methodology is also necessary. Hard drives fail. Some more than others. And as noted above, they frequently fail s-l-o-w-l-y. So a simple backup A and backup B methodology would likely both have the same damaged files. But then, one must ask, why is 'forever' storage necessary? It's not likely you'll ever need to retrieve photos shot 10 years ago and print more pictures. To that end, I'd probably move any shoots that are more than a year old to duplicate DVDs stored in separate locations.

For the bulk of us non-professional photogs, I suspect anything more than a weekly backup of what your 'current' work is overkill. Although hard drives are now less than a dollar per gigabyte (vs $250 for 30 Megabyte drive 25 yrs ago!) and RAID may seem an easy solution, from what I've read, RAID is not-so-easy for a computer novice to deal with, especially in the event of a failure.

Through all my years in computers, one rule has always remained...KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). And that's how I still do it. My post processing methodology is still evolving, but here's what I do at present:

1. As 2nd or 3rd level protection from accidentally wiping out a picture or 5 while doing post processing, I do not delete/erase the memory card until ALL processing and delivery is completed on that shoot. Memory cards are cheap insurance.

2. I also shoot in RAW + JPG, and transfer both sets to to physically different drives my computer.

3. I then work on only one set of RAW in Lightroom, and output as JPG to a different folder. When all my LR work is done, I copy that output folder to another, and use the copy as input for Photoshop editing. Some things are easier in PS than LR, so I use both, as needed. Photoshop outputs replace the files they came from, as I still have the Lightroom output 'originals' in another folder.

4. When all is complete, I make a copy of the 'finished product' to another folder, on another drive.

5. I print, make CDs or DVDs, or PowerPoint presentations from there.

6. When everything is done, I move the RAW, LR output folder, and finished products to a long-term 1TB drive, deleting everything else on my 'in process' drives. If it's a shoot I really have to keep 'forever', I may burn a DVD or two of the images.

7. The 1TB drive gets backed up to clone 1TB drive when convenient...hopefully, monthly, and keep it in my file cabinet at my office.

8. To facilitate making drive clones, I have each of my drives in 'hot swap' bays. I simply turn off the computer, slide in the backup target drive, make a backup, and remove it. SATA-3 transfers are so much faster than USB 2 or even 3 to an external drive.

In the event of incoming major weather problems, fire, riot, or anything else, I can slide all the drives out of all my computers in less than 30 seconds and be gone! And, oh yes, ALL original purchased software CDs as well as downloaded software (purchased and free-ware) are copied on my long-term hard drive...as is a WORD document with -ALL- serial numbers, etc. If I have to start over from nothing more than my HDs, I can.