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Archive 2015 · image backup strategies

  
 
angel manguel
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · image backup strategies


Hi everyone,

I have been backing up images to three external HDD when importing into LR. One of the drives is now failing to mount and a second is temperamental about it. Not a matter of if a drive will fail but when. So I am looking at alternatives for backups as well as recommendations on good quality gear. I have been using Lacie with good luck but this particular Lacie drive is only 2 years old and is not running with any great frequency. G-technology looks like a good option - three year warranty. I did have a Promise Pegasus 8 TB RAID display backing up a laptop that was a joke. It failed after 18 months, no longer under warranty and the company would NOT even talk to me - BUY A NEW ONE they said. See ya!

RAID seems to be a goofy system for the amateur, which I am. There is no protection with RAID 0 or 1 if a file is corrupted. RAID 5 needs 5 drives! And some pro photogs are even suggesting RAID is neither useful nor easy to use and offers little in the way of protection for lost or damaged image files.

Any ideas out there or anyone willing to share how they protect their images?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Alan



Nov 12, 2015 at 10:29 PM
abrehm
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · image backup strategies


Get CrashPlan online backup. $60/year unlimited and you can backup your whole computer!


Nov 12, 2015 at 10:45 PM
ckcarr
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · image backup strategies


Not cool cross-posting into landscape, a presentation forum.

"This forum is for the presentation and discussion of presented images. All gear discussions go to the gear forums."



Nov 12, 2015 at 11:11 PM
John Zeman
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · image backup strategies


I've used a Drobo, which is similar to the RAID principle, as my primary backup device for 5 years now and I love it. Before I got it I was buying external hard drives left and right because I kept filling them up. Now with the Drobo I have 15TB of storage space spread across 5 hard drives, and everything I copy to it is automatically duplicated to other drives installed in the Drobo. If one of those 5 hard drives is full or goes bad, I just replace it with a new one and I'm right back up to speed again.

If the internal circuitry in the Drobo goes bad, I just get a new Drobo and move my 5 hard drives into it then I'm back up and running again.



Nov 12, 2015 at 11:15 PM
steveashe
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · image backup strategies


I have a subscription for Office 365 from Microsoft which includes about a terabyte of storage for $99 a year. I copied all my images to their Cloud (OneDrive) last week. Not quite sure how to do iterative backups to OneDrive yet but backing up to the Cloud is pretty cool. I also have a local external drive that I keep a copy on.


Nov 13, 2015 at 12:47 AM
angel manguel
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · image backup strategies


ckcarr wrote:
Not cool cross-posting into landscape, a presentation forum.

"This forum is for the presentation and discussion of presented images. All gear discussions go to the gear forums."


Apologies. The cross-posting is a "newish" feature and since there are many outstanding photographers on the landscape forum, whom I am sure backup faithfully, I thought I might ask. Won't make that mistake again.

Alan



Nov 13, 2015 at 01:26 AM
OregonSun
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · image backup strategies


Shoot film, it will last a hundred years in a shoe box


Nov 13, 2015 at 01:27 AM
rscheffler
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · image backup strategies


I would suggest future HDD purchases that are not contained in enclosures. IMO, it's better to work with bare drives in a dock or multi-bay enclosure set up as JBOD, that you can swap as needed. Or, buy drives in enclosures but remove them from the enclosures and use them instead in a dock. Usually drives in enclosures are a bit less expensive than bare drives, for some reason. One thing to look out for is the 'portable' 2.5" drives found in enclosures lately have been made with interfaces specific to the enclosures and not the standard SATA interface, which would make them unusable in a dock, for example. So far this hasn't been a problem with 3.5" 'desktop' drives in enclosures.

A problem with the single enclosed drives is that sometimes the enclosure hardware dies before the drive does. Sometimes you can pull the drive from the enclosure and still access the info, but sometimes the enclosure's hardware is needed to translate the contents of the drive back into something meaningful to display on the computer. Therefore IMO it's better just to work with bare drives from the beginning to avoid this problem.

RAID isn't really a good backup strategy. Too many variables that can go wrong, though solutions like Drobo seem to take a lot of the uncertainty out of it. But even there, if parity is good for one drive to go bad, what happens if say there was a power spike and half the drives were fried, or all? SOL without another backup. The biggest fear I'd have is the RAID controller dying and not being able to replace the hardware with something equivalent from the manufacturer that will read the existing array. I guess a software RAID would be one way around this... But IMO, as the complexity increases, it's just an invitation for more to go wrong. Keep it simple.

My method probably isn't the most ideal or logical either, but so far it's working. I buy bare drives as I need them. Some I use as my 'dailies' where everything is on them over a certain chronological period. And these are duplicated until I process the images and those are then backed up to other 'themed' drives such as client work/jobs, travel, friends & family, sports, etc., meanwhile still keeping one set on the dailies drives. When a themed drive fills up (which sometimes takes a while), I buy a higher capacity drive, clone over the previous contents and continue filling it. The full drive is then kept as an additional back up of older content. As files are migrated to larger capacity drives, the older drives are retained. This way there is at least one or two relatively new drives that should be OK. The concern with HDDs is if they sit unused too long, they'll go bad from lack of use.

Additionally, I back up to two cloud services: Amazon Web Services's S3, which is pay as you go and also to Google Drive (I set up multiple Google accounts to somewhat reflect my themed drives). To these I only upload final edits of processed images. So far no raws. IMO, the AWS S3 solution is the more 'industrial' and robust one, but Google Drive offers some advantages, such as creating galleries and sharing those with clients for image downloads, or friends & families, etc. when an attractive public presentation is desired (which isn't possible with AWS, though you can send others links to specific files on AWS). You could also do similar to Google Drive with Flickr's free 1TB, but I think the problem with Flickr is it's difficult, if not impossible to batch download images if you need to recover a large number of them.



Nov 13, 2015 at 02:04 AM
Ian.Dobinson
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · image backup strategies


steveashe wrote:
I have a subscription for Office 365 from Microsoft which includes about a terabyte of storage for $99 a year. I copied all my images to their Cloud (OneDrive) last week. Not quite sure how to do iterative backups to OneDrive yet but backing up to the Cloud is pretty cool. I also have a local external drive that I keep a copy on.


yep and how long will that last ?

a while back they were offereing unlimited space for 365 subscribers . I tried it for a few months and it was slow to upload (although some of that was my isp getting the hump about large uploads)




Nov 13, 2015 at 07:11 AM
jcolwell
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · image backup strategies


I keep all of my image files on at least two hard drives. My desktop has three archive drives totaling 7 GB , which were filled in order over time, starting with E:, and now I'm on G:. I also have matching external mirror drives stored in a fireproof safe box. Whenever I come in with new image cards, I dump all of the image files on the current internal archive drive, in folders named for the current date (e.g. G:/2015-11-13a/, -13b/, ...). Once all of the cards are on the desktop archive drive, I retrieve the current external archive drive and copy everything there. All of my image processing is done on a different internal drive (D: ), which I mirror-copy to another external drive a couple of times a year. All of the galleries that I create for events, locations, and similar themes are stored locally on D: and uploaded to my Dropbox account, where many of them are shared.


Nov 13, 2015 at 07:22 AM
Paul Mo
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · image backup strategies


I wouldn't bother with online backups with the size/cost of HDD's these days. Just find a couple of safe offsite locations.


Nov 13, 2015 at 11:53 AM
Oscarsmadness
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · image backup strategies


I have all my material on an iMac backed up with a Time Capsule partition on a basic external hard drive. With the low volume of shooting that I do, I let everything sit on the iMac's onboard disk as long as necessary to process a shoot and turn in a portfolio. When I turn in a portfolio, I make a backup DVD that contains the portfolio itself and a handful of raw files. DVD goes into the safe. A month after everything is said and done, I delete the rejects (black flagged), convert the unflagged raw to jpeg, and then back up everything that remains to a different partition on the external hard drive. This is also when I wipe the memory cards (I have a lot of cards).
All of my critical finished product and some of my raw files get copied from my iMac to my laptop, which is frequently out of the house, so that's another layer of safety.
Every year, I make 2 or 3 backup DVDs of really critical stuff. I put all those in the safe. I also like to put the backup hard drive in the safe if I am away on vacation.

I invested in a nice surge protector. Where I live, lightning and irregularities in the electric supply are a greater threat than hard disk failure. Another thing to consider: hard drives knock themselves out. Lightning knocks everybody out.



Nov 13, 2015 at 12:39 PM
dmcphoto
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · image backup strategies


RAID or network drives are no solution if files are corrupted or encrypted by a ransomware virus or deleted by simple human error. Whatever you keep your files on for daily use needs to be backed up to one or preferably two drives that are disconnected and ideally not kept in the same building. I use two drives kept offsite and make backups to them on a alternating basis. That means all of my files are never connected to any computer simultaneously so loss of everything is nearly impossible.

Single hard drives up to 6TB capacity are commonly available now at an extremely low cost per TB. Also, Western Digital produces a "MyBook Duo" that contains two drives that can be configured for RAID 1. These come in various capacities up to 6TB in RAID 1 or 12TB in RAID 0. The individual drives are user replaceable and the price is barely more than buying the two drives alone. One of those in a RAID 1 configuration plus two single drives of the same capacity as the RAID 1 used as alternating backups makes for fairly bullet proof data storage. Current work is always backed up by the RAID and catastrophic losses are prevented by the offsite backups.



Nov 13, 2015 at 02:46 PM
shutterbug guy
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · image backup strategies


jcolwell wrote:
I keep all of my image files on at least two hard drives. My desktop has three archive drives totaling 7 GB , which were filled in order over time, starting with E:, and now I'm on G:. I also have matching external mirror drives stored in a fireproof safe box. Whenever I come in with new image cards, I dump all of the image files on the current internal archive drive, in folders named for the current date (e.g. G:/2015-11-13a/, -13b/, ...). Once all of the cards are on the desktop archive drive, I retrieve the current external archive
...Show more

7 GB's Am I missing something?

My desktop has three archive drives totaling 7 GB







Nov 14, 2015 at 09:27 AM
Ian.Dobinson
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · image backup strategies


^^^

i think we can safely assume Jim meant TB .



Nov 14, 2015 at 09:35 AM
ckcarr
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p.1 #16 · p.1 #16 · image backup strategies


I'd guess it depends on your genre, the camera body, whether you shoot raw or jpeg, how often you get out and shoot, and how much you value old work.

Since I shoot landscapes and wildlife primarily using the Nikon D8000E and now the Nikon D810 36mp bodies, each image is a unique, one time opportunity. It's also a very big file. Especially when you're done with processing. I won't delete and think "next time." Because there is no next time.

I'm saving to 12 TB now. It was a conscious decision that will (hopefully) last the rest of my life.

Of course, everyone has access to a "cloud" storage area also, through some device they own. I don't use that though.



Nov 14, 2015 at 09:42 AM
shutterbug guy
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p.1 #17 · p.1 #17 · image backup strategies


Flicker Google drive, are good resources for back-up and it's free, I'm sure there's more. Sure RAW isn't supported but for your finished Jpeg's, not a bad solution imho.

Currently I'm using both above plus my website on Zenfolio along with 2, many times 3 hard drive back-ups. Hopefully it's enough.

Buy more hard drives, they will fail.....



Nov 14, 2015 at 09:58 AM
jcolwell
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p.1 #18 · p.1 #18 · image backup strategies


shutterbug guy wrote:
7 GB's Am I missing something?

My desktop has three archive drives totaling 7 GB


Ian's right. 7 TB. Anyway, what's a letter between friends?



Nov 14, 2015 at 10:09 AM
steveashe
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p.1 #19 · p.1 #19 · image backup strategies


Cloud is incredibly competitive. I don't think MSFT strategy or pricing will change for a while - 1TB is only if you also buy their Office suite and renew annually. It's a great perk and dropping it will upset millions of MSFT customers and ther Cloud vendors have similar offers.


Nov 14, 2015 at 11:25 AM
Lee Saxon
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p.1 #20 · p.1 #20 · image backup strategies


rscheffler wrote:
Usually drives in enclosures are a bit less expensive than bare drives, for some reason.


Because supposedly they use binned drives (ie ones that didn't quite pass inspection to be sold as the top tier bare drive product) for the consumer enclosures.

I don't know if that's actually true.

And if it is, there's not necessarily anything wrong with that. It's very common. Most people without trust funds own a binned CPU and GPU. But if you can afford the first tier parts you might as well.



Dec 29, 2015 at 03:19 AM
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