rscheffler Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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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.
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