What would you do with your files if you are on my situation

Robin Usagani · Jan 5, 2011

buckster, with your setup, will you be able to see EVERYTHING on your puter? Looks like it huh? Yeah, I need a good solution. I am thinking ahead though.

Mo, with your setup you will only have 1 copy. Right?

Trever1t · Jan 5, 2011

Interesting....

I backup to external HD (continuous) but after a drive failure (which was redundantly backed up!) I burned all my RAW files to DVD. I don't need to save edited tiff or jpg files indefinitely so for now that's what I do. It's not the best filing system but at least I know I can retrieve them if need be.

Buckster · Jan 5, 2011

Schwettylens said:
buckster, with your setup, will you be able to see EVERYTHING on your puter? Looks like it huh? Yeah, I need a good solution. I am thinking ahead though.

Mo, with your setup you will only have 1 copy. Right?

Yeah, I see and can access everything all the time. The day I can't see a drive is the day I replace it with a new one and run the backup onto it, which has happened just once so far, but made recovery painless, quick and easy.

Robin Usagani · Jan 5, 2011

Buck, you said you ave 10TB system. That means you have 5TB and the other half is for back up? Can you tell me how much you think your system cost?

I wonder how much it would cost if I get a service somewhere where it would automatically replicate all of my hard drives online (set the schedule to do it while I am asleep to reduce bandwith while I use the puter).

Buckster · Jan 5, 2011

Schwettylens said:
Buck, you said you ave 10TB system. That means you have 5TB and the other half is for back up?

Correct.

Schwettylens said:
Can you tell me how much you think your system cost?

More than it would today, because 1TB drives are less expensive now. Priced now, about...

$200 - (2) Port Multipliers
$400 - (2) Drive Towers with Power supplies
$140 - (10) 2 meter length eSATA Cables
$ 30 - (1) eSATA controller
$500 - (8) 1TB sata internal hard drives
---------
$1270 - Total

Schwettylens said:
I wonder how much it would cost if I get a service somewhere where it would automatically replicate all of my hard drives online (set the schedule to do it while I am asleep to reduce bandwith while I use the puter).

I tried that, but couldn't deal with it. It's not very expensive, but it takes forever. Upload speeds for all but the most expensive online services are freakishly slow when you're talking the amounts of data we are.

Even running it all the time in the background, I just couldn't get my data uploaded faster than I was generating it, and I don't shoot as much as a lot of folks around here.

Of course, take into account that I'm one of those who sees my RAWs as negatives, and am most interested in backing those up over anything else. From those, I can recreate the rest of what I might have generated, but there's no going 'home' after the original's destroyed.

shuttermountain · Jan 5, 2011

As others have suggested, an external drive is much better then DVD's in terms of reliability. That said, external drives will not help you much if your house catches fires, gets burglarized etc and the drive is now burned beyond use or has been re-formatted by the thief...

I use a combination of external drives and also do backups to cloud storage on Amazon S3.

Dropbox is also a very good online backup solution and very affordable and also uses Amazon S3 as it's storage service

GeorgieGirl · Jan 5, 2011

I keep the cards. I back up to Time Capsule. I back up to Mobile Me. I back up to Click Free. I back up to Smug Mug.

I am all over the place, but I have had several hard drives crash and I like to back up now in several locations.

aaneiros · Jan 5, 2011

DVDs will stop working sooner or later. And so will hard drives but they offer the possibility to have redundant copies of all your files.

I know it may look expensive but I think one of the safest ways to store your files is on a raid of disks, where all the information on them is mirrored so if one of the drives fails you still have backups on the others. 1/2 TB disks are quite affordable these days.

Also, you can store your files online, also at a price and maybe that's not very convenient if you have an enormous amount of files...

Hope this helps...

Antonio

LokiZ · Jan 5, 2011

The unfavorable thing I have found about DVD's as backups are the insane access times for DVD's packed full of nothing else but Raw files and multitudes of filesnames on one DVD. Maybe this is just me due to a PC that is as old as the birth of XP. Anyone else find this on newer machines?

I would suggest as the cheapest way to go... (other then DVD) getting an external HD bay and then you can back up to a real hard drive but at the same time cut costs on the HDs by not having to spend the extra money they charge for individual external casing on every every external HD you purchase. Just by internal HDs and plug and play in the bay.

This is what we do for Backups of the operating systems and programming for our production lines and it has worked really well.

MohaimenK · Jan 5, 2011

Schwettylens said:
buckster, with your setup, will you be able to see EVERYTHING on your puter? Looks like it huh? Yeah, I need a good solution. I am thinking ahead though.

Mo, with your setup you will only have 1 copy. Right?

No that is not correct. I have my computer which saves my images ATM and my external (internal) HD saves a mirror copy of my photo folder. So I have 2. I am not near buck's set up yet although I have 5tb HD left I don't enough enough files to keep there. I will upgrade as I needed down the road.

Also, remember, when your backup hard drive isn't connected, it's safe from crashing and my backup hard drive only turns on when I plug it in the dock for uploading.

shuttermountain · Jan 5, 2011

aaneiros said:
DVDs will stop working sooner or later. And so will hard drives but they offer the possibility to have redundant copies of all your files.

I know it may look expensive but I think one of the safest ways to store your files is on a raid of disks, where all the information on them is mirrored so if one of the drives fails you still have backups on the others. 1/2 TB disks are quite affordable these days.

Also, you can store your files online, also at a price and maybe that's not very convenient if you have an enormous amount of files...

RAID is not backup

As for storing files online, I currently have about 30 GB of images stored on Amazon S3. If you upload new files on a regular basis, it is not an overwhelming project and will not exceed some smaller ISP monthly data transfer caps.

adversus · Jan 5, 2011

My photo's are split into yearly Aperture libraries on my Mac Pro (my mobile library is merged into my main current library when I'm remote shooting).

I backup my desktop to network drives via Time Machine.

I backup offsite with Mozy (currently about 750gb up there, just photos).

CCericola · Jan 5, 2011

I have a RAID set up, everything is mirrored. We also backup everything to Mosey, our remote backup supplier.

Dao · Jan 5, 2011

I am a technical person. Work in an environment that has thousands of servers and storage devices such as Netapp, dell equallogic or storage boxes based on Sun ZFS.

But for simple home storage, I will do the following.

-Just setup a storage system at home based on simple hardware. That is my primary storage. I prefer not to create a huge storage, just few TB is good enough.

-If run out of storage space, either create another RAID set or create another storage unit. Based on my personal experience, I do not want to put all eggs in one basket. YMMV

-RAID 5 or 6 OR just RAID 1. Make it simple. Just use a old P4 box and it is fast enough.

-Currently, I am using Openfiler as the storage OS.

Note: RAID setup is just for the uptime, not for backup. So if one drive die, I do not need to restore the backup.

-And once in awhile, backup the files from the storage to a external drive or internal drive with a dock. Then take the drive to work.

- If you do not want to mess with RAID or storage type software such as Openfiler or FreeNAS, just use a old Windows XP PC. Install 2x 2TB HD and share one disk on your network. And then use a free backup/ file replicate software to sync the files from one disk to another disk. Syncback works pretty well and it is free.