I have had some problems lately with hard drives so now I am considering using external hard drives along with another backup service such as Carbonite or crash plan. Can anyone tell me about either of these plans, it seems as though they will handle nikon NEF files, is it slow to back up-although it seems like it would not matter. I use macs and it seems like carbonates basic plan is the only one that is compatible, but it seems like the basic plan would be good for me
The only reason to backup offsite it to protect from a disaster at your home/office.
If you backup to 2 rotating external hard drives and keep them disconnected when not in use, unless a tornado, earthquake, or fire hits you, you should be just fine. If however you want to be extra cautious or paranoid you can backup offsite online and it will take forever. You could also store a hard drive offsite for archiving and natural disaster protection of what it contains. If you do this remember to take a drive offsite as needed.
To keep from losing photos you have not backed up or are currently editing and have not backed up require mirrored hard drives or raid in addition to the above backup plan.
We are currently using a Lacie http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/598075-REG/LaCie_301352U_2TB_2big_Quadra_External.htmland - we received an error message that we could no longer edit and save changes on that hard drive. We tried to repair disc permissions and it said it could not be repaired. We did copy everything on another hard drive. Would we be better off with 2 separate hard drives. There was about 500 gb of photos on that Lacie.
Good timing. I'm getting ready to buy an iMac, (my first Mac) and was wondering the same thing. I already have carbonite, and let me tell you, with about 35G of back up, it took almost 4 days! It's there now, and updates go un-noticed. I'm asleep when it kicks on.
I have been trying to decide which harddrive to go with on the iMac, (should start a thread on that) and then depend on a pair of externals to store my Photo files. One to keep at the inlaws house down the road. This will keep the laod off my iMac's hard drive (or drives?) since I will be sharing this computer with my wife. It is not dedicated to the darkroom, but as a household computer as well.
Doesn't Apple have some external drives that are Mac oriented?
Doesn't Apple have some external drives that are Mac oriented?
Any hard drive will work with any platform. Just make sure you format them appropriately. The best bang for the buck is to buy bare drives and enclosures separately. It is simple to install the drive into the enclosure, and you have the freedom of replacing the drive or controller easily if one or the other goes bad.
I have a Network Attached Storage device (Netgear ReadyNAS), which has four one TB hard drives in it. I set it up with a RAID 5 configuration so that I have a total of about 3 TBs, with redundancy (if one of the four drives fails, I can still get the data). I backup photos there about once a month. It is not normally turned on. I am (as I type) restoring my photos from that drive (long story about why I need to restore). I have been using it for over a year, and am very happy. Also, once a year, I copy all my photos and put it on a single hard drive that I give to my son, so that it is offsite (in case of fire, earthquake, etc.). Good luck. It does take some thought and research.
Keith W.
When you do your own external drives, do you still have use of Thunderbolt, or do you have to go to firewire. I assumed that you would need the Thunderbolt external drive to get the Thunderbolt speed. Maybe I'm not getting how that all works.
Coupla points:
1) Dave is correct, offsite protects from damage in your home, I don't feel this is important
2) I am very satisfied with my NetGear ReadyNas NV+. I have an older version (about 6 years of use now) and am very impressed. Load it up with 4 high capacity disk drives, set at RAID X and you are protected from a drive failure. I use this for backup of all of my home PCs and doubles as a music server for my home. It also will run many services such as FTP so you can transfer files to/from it from outside your home/office. This is a very high-performance unit and support many different PCs/people accessing the drives without hiccups.
3) With a NAS (network attached storage), you are not protected from the unit's electronics failing. For that, I have a few high capacity disk drives that I back that up to once a week or so. I have a cheap ($30) external hard drive docking bay caddy where I just snap in a raw, high capacity hard drive to back up the NAS.
4) 2 TB drives are about $100 now and if you populate the NAS with 4 of them, that is a TON of space. You will need to have a few more of these drives to backup the NAS to. After the backup, I snap out the raw drive, label it, and place it on a shelf.
5) For backup software, I use Microsoft's free SyncToy program to ECHO. This is a fast and easy way to synch all backup systems.
6) My NAS is plugged directly into a UPS and then connected with a USB cable to monitor UPS health. I have the NAS set to power itself down after 5 mnts on UPS power. The UPS also adds power filtration.
7) To protect myself from failure of my main hard drive (an SSD), I use Acronis software and clone the drive weekly to a regular drive I snap into my external caddy. Acronis can clone across dissimilar drive technologies. I have tested all of this and it all works. If my main hard drive fails, I just open my PC, snap out the SSD, snap in the cloned drive, and I am running. The clone is a perfect, operational hard drive with the operating system and all data since the last clone procedure.
This may sound excessive to you but it is not. Once bitten, etc. etc. After you have set all of this up, running backups is a simple, brainless procedure. You should keep a notebook with how to run the procedure and note the dates of the last runs. This whole procedure takes up about 5 mnts of your time each week. I run SyncToy on my main PC to backup to my NAS backup whenever I download new photos or do significant work (a few times a week). I do have multiple drives in my PC, one for the operating system and the LR cat (the SSD) and a few others for data such as RAWs and JPGs. When I run the backup with SyncToy, I pull all the data from all my PC drives at one time to the NAS.
Fast, simple despite how it sounds, and I am protected. Don't ask me about horror stories. They are real and drives are machines.... they will fail.
Yea, I didn't do a good job of 'splainin. Let me try this:
1) Backup all PCs to a fully loaded ReadyNAS using Microsoft's SyncToy software - backup of data
2) Clone main PC hard drive using Acronis - backup of data and operating system to a fully bootable spare drive
3) Backup my backup to independent hard drives - neurosis
Item number 3 is a bit excessive but once bitten.......
Bruce n Philly wrote:
Yea, I didn't do a good job of 'splainin. Let me try this:
1) Backup all PCs to a fully loaded ReadyNAS using Microsoft's SyncToy software - backup of data
2) Clone main PC hard drive using Acronis - backup of data and operating system to a fully bootable spare drive
3) Backup my backup to independent hard drives - neurosis
Item number 3 is a bit excessive but once bitten.......
AND do not leave your backup drives connected to anything, electricity or network unless you are running a backup.
Lightning finds its way to devices in the strangest ways and even with protection mother nature wins. People do not realize a lightning strike can enter your internet wires, hit your network hub and everything connected.
OH, also use a SMART monitoring tool to predict when hard drives are about to fail. This is not bullet proof but is cheap, and can warn you about a hard drive that has more errors than the norm thus indicating it will fail soon.
A co-worker just had a lightening strike hit a tree, then bounced and hit the ground, reached his underground invisible fence perimeter line which was about a hundred feet from the house and a foot underground. From there, it went through the wall unit to the breaker box and then played with everything lse in the house. the only thing that survived was his 60" big screen flatscreen. It was plugged into a lightening protector box thinghy. Which died. But the tv was fine. The computer, he said, shot across the room, just like in the movies. It was also somewhat on fire, and that was a problem. They put it out. Lucky they were home.
Read the fine print about the online back-up. I think Carbonite still removes the data after 30 days when removed from your HD. Only good to back-up what is on the computer itself. Crashplan will leave it as long as you have a drive letter assigned and not removed.
You are right! I almost forgot about that. Carbonite only backs up your computers hard drive and no externals. So, when you move your photos from you main drive to the external, your files at Carbonite will be deleted after 30 days.
Why single drives may not be the best backup strategy.
I used to do this.... what ends up happening, is that your backup drive may not have enough space at some point. When this happens, you start to split your backups across drives and this is just a nightmare.
If your computing environment is just one PC with just one drive, then a single backup drive makes sense. But if you start adding drives to you main PC, you will start to need more backup storage. I know it is more expensive to buy one of these Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices like the ReadyNAS NV+, but they really are the best way to go.
A NAS, as in the name, sits on your network attached via an Ethernet cable to your router (they are gigabit, so your router and PC should be gigabit also to get the full speed) and any PC in your home or office can have access to it. This makes backups really easy as you can create a folder (or "share") on the NAS for each person or department. Then they can backup their drives to the NAS also.
The NAS doesn't have to be just a backup device, but can be used as a file server for passing around documents or photographs for processing.
These NASs can be configured with just two big drives, or three, or four or six depending on the model. What is nice about this is you can grow your capacity as needed. Start with two drives, as it fills over time, add another, add another. Cool.
You configure the drives for RAID so the computers see this as one big drive (made up of how many you installed). If one drive fails, a red light will light on the unit and an email will be sent to whomever you want. The NAS continues to run and the files are still in tact and available. You snap in a new drive (hot swap) and the unit just repairs itself with the new drive and in time, you are back up to normal. The system will run slowly with a failed drive and during the repair process but will run.
If you are paranoid like me, you can backup the NAS (a backup of a backup) by attaching a super big drive to the NAS via a USB and set it for autobackup. The software in the NAS can also backup itself to an offsite service like Carbonite (although I never tried this).
For backup software, there is a ton of stuff outthere. I use Microsoft's free SyncToy configured for ECHO. I tried some more sophisticated stuff like Retrospect but it is so complicated that I ditched it and went with the simple, free solution of SyncToy.
These things are really amazing. They are commercial data center technologies available now for the home or office.
I have been using the ReadyNAS products and trust them but there are others like the LACIE.
Once I had the ReadyNAS in my home system, I store my ripped CD collection on it and it serves music to any PC/device on my home network. On my home theater system, I access the NAS so I can scroll through pictures on the big screen (how I hooked this up is a whole 'nuther story).
