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Backup (what is good?)
Zerodog
Registered Users Posts: 1,480 Major grins
Now I am using an external drive that is almost full. I feel like all the eggs are in one basket with this method. I am looking for something that is more redundant and possibly fixable.
Drobo seems like a great idea. But I have read some horrible things about it. Is it good? Is it horrible? Is it good if you are using another backup method? Or using it as a backup to your main drives on your computer?
Or I can just get more external drives?
What is a good way to go?
Drobo seems like a great idea. But I have read some horrible things about it. Is it good? Is it horrible? Is it good if you are using another backup method? Or using it as a backup to your main drives on your computer?
Or I can just get more external drives?
What is a good way to go?
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thats the only safe way
external drives are not reliable
you are warned
/ɯoɔ˙ƃnɯƃnɯs˙ʇlɟsɐq//:dʇʇɥ
You need some kind of off-site storage in case your house is burgled or burns down. Either use an on-line service like Smugmug or keep external drives somewhere else.
In house the best is something like Apple Time Machine which takes a backup at regular intervals and which you don't have to think about.
Solutions like Drobo - which I have never used - are some kind of RAID solution so you can hold a duplicate of your local hard disks in case your hard disk fails. In thirty years of computing I never had a hard disk fail - famous last words - so I am not so impressed. The best strategy is to use on-line off-site storage imho,
I'm a bit wary about using special backup software as more often than not, when you need to recover is the time when you find that the special backup software isn't on the machine to which you're trying to recover files etc etc…
HTH -
- Wil
http://www.backblaze.com/
http://crashplan.com
http://mozy.com
and more if you do some looking...
http://www.danalphotos.com
http://www.pluralsight.com
http://twitter.com/d114
not true. CD/DVD recordable media can easily be scratched, ruined by sunlight, not to mention the dye used in them can (actually WILL) degrade over time and will become unreadable (ever see one that looks "cloudy" or has strange patterns around the edges?). do a search on real-life testing of recordable optical media and you'll start using other methods to augment your approach to backups.
I concur with gecko.... CD/DVD's are NOT the solution for long term or on going back up of data.
It would be very helpful if you (Zerodog) could share with us your hardware and OS.
If something like a Drobo is too expensive or seems too complex look to using a "Drive Dock".
If you have an eSATA port on your PC/Mac/laptop get one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153071
There are several different brands and configurations.
You simply use a bare SATA type drive - bare drives are cheap if you know where to buy them. I think the latest versions of these support 2TB capacities. Plug the drive into the dock. Format it. Copy your files over.
Get a system going of more than one drive. Rotate through them. At least once a month back-up to one drive that you take offsite. You need it offsite in case you get burgarlarized or have a fire.
Don't use backup software that copies a compressed and/or encrypted backup file to the external drive. Use software that writes a native OS file.
Some software to check out for use with this type of device:
Beyond Compare
http://www.scootersoftware.com/
SyncBackSE or SyncBack Freeware
http://www.2brightsparks.com/index.html
Btw... of the various NAS type devices, so far Drobo has not appealed to me because of its' connectivity options.
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Raw files are downloaded from the card to both of my internal desktop hard drives (OS and backup). Nightly, SyncBackSE copies over my Lightroom files and any created jpegs to the backup (internal) hard drive. At 2am, the backup hard drive is copied offsite via Mozy Home. The initial upload to Mozy took several days (90gb), but the nightly backups are done by the time I get up. Also, i didn't really like Mozy until the recent software upgrade. Now its pretty good.
I use SugarSync for backing up all my documents and non-photo/music/video data.
…but do any of you ever do fire-drills, just to prove that it works?
If not, then the whole exercise is a bit of a waste of time…
- Wil
The key in my opinion is also to know what is master and what is backups. Having the same file in multiple locations with different dates of change and not sure which is the master can cause many headaches.
I do not feel comfortable Drobo in general as it is not a "standard" raid system from what I have read. Since it can support differing drive sizes it isn't standard. This might seem small but when/if the Drobo hardware (not the drives) fails you can't just insert into another raid solution.
The other key thing is that I assume that bad things are going to happen and that hard disks will fail, OS's will crash... etc. Having a plan ahead of time can get one back up and running very quickly.
I actually just wrote up a blog post about it on my site at http://bradfordbenn.com/2010/05/data-backup-and-access/
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Cd and dvd's are not reliable either.... I have had a whole spindle of both Cd and DVD's to go corrupt in less than 2 days after burning as back ups........in reality nothing is perfect.......but I now rely on seagate harddrives for my archiving .... a system of 3 drives each an exact duplicate of the original.....there are online place to archive but last I looked non were accepting any type of RAW files....so I have gone that route except for my SMUGMUG Account that houses all of my finished jpgs upto 24mb...
using any method of disk archiving (CD, DVD, HDD) should include a minimum of 3 disks stored in different places....1 at home, 1 in a bank safety box and 3 in office or another relatives home...or stored in a quality gun safe in your basement...by quality something that has a direct burn time of over an hour before the objects in side are in danger (Browning and Liberty both make excellent safes) and if in your basement the threat of heat from a fire is minimal
I used to send discs to my father 3000 miles away to be my remote backup. A year ago I switched to Backblaze. If you've got any sort of broadband connection, you can't beat $5 a month for unlimited storage.
As for local backup, I use just a single external hard drive. When I fill up a drive, drive sizes have usually increased, and I buy a new larger drive (usually enough to get me through another year plus before I run out of room again) and move everything over to it. Newsy has a good point about rotating drives, but I feel comfortable enough with Backblaze as my offsite storage that I don't worry about the extremely low chance that I'll lose both my primary and my local backup at the same time.
I also second Wil Davis. Your backup is no good if you haven't proved you can recover files from it. Just because you can write to your external drive doesn't mean the files won't have errors when you try to read them back off of it.
Backblaze (and I believe a few others) don't care what kind of files you archive. I think by default their software excludes things like .iso, .cab and a few others, but that is user configurable.
They used to not allow "business" accounts, which made some pro photographers nervous, but that has changed in the last 6 months.
Excellent point, Wil. If you don't test the recovery you may be in for an unpleasant surprise when disaster strikes. I've seen this happen more than once in corporate IT settings. The problem is that if you don't have redundant hardware it's hard to design a test that doesn't put your data at risk if your scheme is flawed.
There are many choices. At a minimum, you need to have two copies of everything on separate media. Whether you go beyond that depends on how valuable you consider your photos. My working files are on my machine and are backed up automatically to an external drive every night by SyncBack SE. My archive is on an external drive and duplicate DVDs. I also have quality 10 jpgs of my best stuff on SmugMug. As an amateur, I think this is sufficient, but if I were a pro, I would want off-site external drives and cloud storage as well. Over the past couple of years I have lost my internal drive and my external drive (fortunately, not at the same time) and was able to recover everything. I know that I am screwed if both my internal and external drives go at once, but if my house burns down, that will be the least of my problems.
Most CD-Rs on the market are fighting on price and use the cheapest coating the supplier thinks he can get away with - generally silver in color. There is so little profit in this market that manufacturers strip the material content to below the bare minimum. They are no good for archiving and you are lucky when you can use them in your car audio system or another CD drive even..
The original CD-R spec can preserve data for many years - question is whether you will still be able to read the file format or whether there will still be CD readers, but the right media will last "100 years" when stored sensibly and it is still on-sale.
Is there any brand of HD dock that is more or less a rack, power supply and a USB or eSATA cable? I could then put in regular drives and drag files over to it?
As far as my computer goes it is a PC running window 7. Intel core duo e8400 3.0GHz, ram 8GB, HDs 2 500GB in some sort of RAID configuration to give 1TB, and for graphics I am running a NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250
Right now my main photo folder is 134gb with 23,000 files. Not too bad but my needs are accelerating. So I want to go with something that I can expand easily. And I do like the idea of the 2-3 backup drives. I was thinking of getting a safe deposit box at the bank and putting my current external drive in there and swapping backups out in the future.
The only cd I would trust are Mam-A out of Colorado........that is what we went to at the Uni. I used to work for in their recording studio.........Our several failures per hundred went to a failure every several thousand.
I went to Hdd due to cost effectiveness and it has been good for me.....every 3 or so years I buy new hdd's to re- archive the oldest and sell the old ones to locals needing a second or third hard drive cheap.
if you have no room for more disks ,
there exist an adapter [sitecom] that can mount HHD's via usb
mayby not handy but it works and its cheap
http://www.alternate.nl/html/product/prodPicPopup.html?cmd=next&artno=RDUS01&view=0
/ɯoɔ˙ƃnɯƃnɯs˙ʇlɟsɐq//:dʇʇɥ
(Backup plans should follow the '3, 2, 1 rule": 3 copies, 2 different media, 1 off-site." So, have your primary working drive, a separate drive or DVDs, and one offsite copy.)
Taiyo Yuden is another name I would look for.
I still have a couple of Kodak-Philips gold cd-r (photo-cd) disks that are 30 years old and still readable on any drive. I don't suppose you can buy these anymore. Kodak quit the market too early.
That said, external drives are inexpensive. I have one drive devoted just to photography and a duplicate hard drive is kept at work. Each year I buy a new external hard drive (only about $100) as a new primary drive. The old primary drive then becomes the backup at work and the old backup drive goes into the pool of "retired" drives that store noncritical temporary files. This way my primary drive is never more than one year old and the backup drive is never more than two years old. Theoretically, I could use the retired drives to add a third level of backup on a drive that's less than three years old, but I feel two is enough.
I use the same system for music/other files, so my yearly expenditure for backups is about $200. Fortunately, drives keep getting bigger for the same price, so each year that $200 has bought more and more space.
BTW, all the "retired" drives (about five of them now) are still fully functional, although one has one bad firewire port (fortunately it has two ports).
EDIT: In another thread Andy emphatically recommended BackBlaze. My initial backup to them is now running. We'll see how it goes.
The Railroad Photographer
www.railroadphotographer.com
crashplan.com is one that supports this kind of backup initialization.
http://www.danalphotos.com
http://www.pluralsight.com
http://twitter.com/d114
My photo drives don't run all the time. They do when I am doing photo work, but other times I simply shut them down, or have my Mac off. If you are using Mozy or Backblaze, as soon as the drive is not available, a clock starts ticking on that data, as it is considered either deleted, old or no longer valid. Of course if you reconnect your drive in 30 days( for Mozy), it will reset the clock. Crashplan does not do this. What you upload is yours, for as long as you pay them to keep it for you.
Now, I haven't had time to mess with video in several months, it is extremely time consuming. I have managed to pull off 35 miniDV tapes worth of my kids growing up, but have not had time to do edits. This 250GB is backed up on Crashplan, and has not been reconnected since 4/26/10, and today is 6/6/10. This means if I were using Mozy, my video files would be deleted, and I would need to re-upload all 250GB again.
Something to consider. Also someone mentioned sending a harddrive to cut the initial upload. This is available as well, called 'seeding'. it costs extra, but might be worth it for you.
The Railroad Photographer
www.railroadphotographer.com
The system is a total of 2TB using 2 1TB drives. It is set to RAID 1 so the 2 disks are mirrors of each other. So the usable storage ends up being 1TB. I am not sure if I want to use this as my main storage drives or just backup. I will have to figure that one out when I get my windows issues sorted out.
Now I just need to find some back up software that I like. Not sure about Lacie's Genie.
My current method of storage is primary data duplicated in a local internal drive, as well as a local external drive i shut off and update weekly-ish. then i have an external drive I leave at work i update monthly or so. I'm not all that close to 500GB let alone 1TB, so it works for now.
But I wanted to get a drobo to easily expand my storage drive. basically move to an SSD system, 1 external drobo, protecting against single drive failure. 2 external super large drive for local duplication, one at home, one at work.
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Frankly if you can afford it, the best is two Drobo FS, each replicating the other over the network. Locate each in a different physical location, such as home and studio. Otherwise, I recommend 2 different media types, even with this Drobo RAID solution. That can be either online, or DVD, tape, etc.
yeah, the drobo is expensive, and I'm only looking at the original, the FS is way too much, as the S is. FW is fine for me, I'm not using it to work off of. My issue is mostly with single drive failure. While I'm pretty protected in my current method, I want the ability to easily expand. Though, I don't currently forsee exceeding 2TB soon, so my current method will hold out for a while longer.
And yeah, online was another avenue I used, but did not like. Mozy/Carbonite are cheap, but I've heard of people who were booted for "abuse" even tho they have "unlimited" as their offering. Plus, it doesn't work well with networked drives as I still might go that route. And S3 storage is just way too expensive... I can live w/ a one month rotation drive at work
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[URL="http://feedback.smugmug.com/forums/17723-smugmug/suggestions/1104583-a-bulk-
gallery-download-button-for-my-visitors"]bulk download option for clients[/URL]
As i mentioned above, check out Crashplan,which specifically addresses your concerns, which were concerns of mine as well, and moved me away from Mozy onto Crashplan.