I have a back up question-I typically load photos on a lacie dual HD and burn DVDs, but i have been very busy lately and have been falling behind on burning DVDs-especialy since the newer cameras have larger file sizes and more DVDs are needed per job, I would love to stop burning DVDs. Is the Lacie dual HD enough? What do other photographers do?
Thanks, Dave
This is a question for the ages. Online backup is too slow (especially if you have triple-digit GB's of photos the first time you decide to do it), hard drives are hard to keep up with, DVD's are too small and time consuming and RAID is expensive and a little hard to use.
Personally, I have a small NAS (network attached storage - basically a couple of drives in a can hooked up to my router) where the two drives are copies of each other so if one fails the other is still good. They automatically back up the PC that has all my photos on it. Every once in a while I take one drive out and put it a spare. The "spare" is automatically made into a copy of the other drive, and the drive I took out goes to the safe deposit box (and is the new spare). That way if my house burns down I'm still covered to some extent.
If you alternate hard drives, that is a decent solution. It is a little more manual, and is a little at risk of hard drive failure, but better than 98% of the world.
I used to be the product manager for a PC backup and recovery program, so my thinking on this topic is probably a little over-baked I wrote a blog post about this topic not too long ago:
I used to use DVDs until I ran into the same problem as you did.
My original and edited images are on a single 1.5 TB external drive. I use Time Machine on OSX on demand as the edited images are too big to back up while I'm PPing, sucking the life out of the iMac. Time Machine is on a 3 TB external drive.
Then weekly, I use Seagate's backup to another external 2 TB drive which is specifically for images (original & edited) as well as personal business. This is online for as short a period as possible to mitigate any power surge issues and is stored elsewhere.
The fallacy in relying completely on raid is that it just takes 1 surge and all your drives can be toast. Part of everyone's backup strategy should include offsite storage regardless what you're putting your images on.
I wrote a blog post about this topic not too long ago: