What's your photo backup solution?

[deckcadet]

Well, I just upgraded my backup system for photo storage, so I thought i'd find out what you all are using now.

At first I didn't back up. Then after losing some cruise photos about 5 years ago, I bought an external hard drive and never looked back. It was a 40GB USB maxtor.

More recently I needed more, so I bought a 300GB maxtor One Touch II USB/FireWire HD, which I now use on my macbook Pro using a program called SuperDuper, which not only automatically transfers and/or updates files using your custom parameters, but can actually make a bootable clone of your internal hard drive.

This week I received the FirmTek dual-bay hot swappable 2EN2 SATA3Gbps/ eSATA hard drive enclosure. it is extremely well built, with selectable speed fan, dual bays with lockable drive trays, SATA 3Gbps internal interface and eSATA 3Gbps external interface. On the computer side I have their 2SM2-E Expresscard/34 with eSATA interface. BareFeats benchmarked it several times faster than FireWire or USB, and almost twice as fast again with a RAID 0 array. I'll probably be using it as RAID 1 or just two independent disks until I can afford a second set of drives for it, at which point I'll go for a RAID 0 set with each pair of drives.

I currently have purchased two WD Caviar SE16 250GB 7200RPM 16MB cache drives to go in it.

So what do YOU use to safeguard your data?

[racingpinarello]

My slides are scanned and then placed offsite, and my data storage are 400gb Seagate external drives. I save my files to two drives so it's duplicated. Once full I keep one drive in storage.

I've lost about 300gb of data/digital images and I never want to face that again.

Loren

[mjs1973]

I have a 400GB Seagate external HD also. My images go onto the HD, then I burn 2 DVD backups. I keep one set of DVD's at home, the other at work. Untill all that is done, I keep a copy on my computers HD as well. Burning DVD's is kind of a pain, but once you loose some of your images, you realize that it's worth the time and efort to make duplicate copies.

[livin4lax09]

move to external HD, then burn a DVD. Only the important images though. The unimportant ones just go on the external.

[freygr]

I burn CD and DVD's, But the CD and DVD's do not have the shelf life of magentic media. I'm going to have to get a external HD for backup one of these days when I get some money....

[Lionheart]

I've got three 400 GB drives in my desktop (not including the boot drive-also 400 GB) for backing up in triplicate using a program called Syncback, as well as an external Seagate 300 GB drive. I burn backups to DVD as well, and keep the external drive and the DVD and CD backups in a different place than my desktop. I also use Syncback to backup my laptop images to my desktop pc via the wireless network at home. Yeah, I'm paranoid about image loss.

[masdog]

My file server (my old desktop) has four hard drives in it. The drive dedicated for my photographs is 160 GB and mirrored, so if one HD goes bad, I won't lose everything.

[shutterman]

Has anyone tried online storage. Adorama has unlimited storage for $19.95/month. You are limited to 30mb per file and to either jpeg or 8 bit tiff but that covers quite a bit for most people

I think I will try it.

Anyone else had any experience?

thanks,
Wes

[berrywise]

For anything that is important I download to my internal hard drive. Then I rename the files and then burn a DVD of all the raw images. Next I copy that folder to an external WD 500 meg drive I have. DVD's are then brought to work to be safe off site.

After I edit images I usually just save to both hard drives.

[Photo-John]

Don't ask questions like this. It's bad luck. I can't talk about it or even think about it.

Knock on wood

Cross fingers

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeekkkkkkkkk!!!!!!!!!!!

You ruined EVERYTHING!!!!!

PS: Post a photo of your new hot swappable drive enclosure. I like the sound of that.

[berrywise]

Has anyone tried online storage. Adorama has unlimited storage for $19.95/month. You are limited to 30mb per file and to either jpeg or 8 bit tiff but that covers quite a bit for most people

I think I will try it.

Anyone else had any experience?

thanks,
Wes

Seems pretty spendy not to mention that amount of time it would take to upload images. I'd say just buy a DVD burner and a safe deposit box and you'd still save money ;o)

[shutterman]

Seems pretty spendy not to mention that amount of time it would take to upload images. I'd say just buy a DVD burner and a safe deposit box and you'd still save money ;o)

You are right....$19.95 is pretty hefty, but it is actually $19.95 PER YEAR. My bad!

I have a couple DVD burners but have not kept up with making copies, especially since I upload prints people are buying to Adorama already.

I think I will try using Adorama more since I can set it to upload pix overnight and it is not too bad. That way I can access them at work or wherever I am.

I will be more likely to order more prints and send them people as well as be able to share with people too.......

Thanks,
Wes

[deckcadet]

I'm not keen on DVDs/CDs as backups for longevity reasons. CDs can literally lose the info just sitting here

[SmartWombat]

I have backup on CD/DVD
Then a stack of 5 external USB HDs for storage
Then the internal 250G HD for working files on the desktop
Then the laptop HD each night after shooting
Then the 80G portable (XSDrive II) store while shooting

Layered storage, until it hits the external USB drives then it's only in one place and that's the scary part. I've got to back up that in an effective manner.

Notice there's no tape backup.
A decent size tape drive would cost me well over £1000, or the cost of 3 large disks.
Not to mention the cost of the tapes.
Degradation of tape in storage over a period of time is a problem, as is the lifetime of the tape drive itself.
I could instead put that money into RAID disks for a server.

I need to put together a JBOD server on the house LAN for working storage with a couple of terabytes, probably a cheap box running Linux as a poor man's NAS.

Then a far bigger RAID machine to store everything; photos, videos, music, for the wired house I have planned after we build the extension. Probably put that out in the garage where it can whir and hum and hot keep me awake at night !


As I see it, RAID if the key. It allows me to use hot swappable drive modules and replace drives every few years as they run out of power-on lifetime (or warranty) and have it rebuild itself automatically as I swap a disk at a time.
As drive technology moves on, eventually I'll have to replace the drives, say IDE with SATA, in one mad purge every 5 or more years as the old technology becomes unavailable.
But that would be the right time to upgrade the box it's running on too (my 386/33 lasted 10 years as a server) as the server hardware wears out.

I'm not going to go for redundant power supplies, or for UPS at this point, but that is an important thing to consider on your machines. If you're in the middle of writing to disk and the power fails - it could corrupt the disk. Then where's your data integrity? Even on a RAID system you are in trouble ... uninterruptible power supplies will save your data in flight. As long as you remember to put the network hub/switch on the UPS as well as the server and workstations !

Sorry, this has turned into more than just backup solution, I hope it's useful and not just geek ramblings from my IT background.

[Photo-John]

We love you (and deckcadet) even though you're a nerd.

[SmartWombat]

We love you (and deckcadet) even though you're a nerd.

... and the geeks shall inherit the earth
But beware geeks bearing .gifs

[Photo-John]

... and the geeks shall inherit the earth
But beware geeks bearing .gifs

Harrrr harrrrrrr!

That was a good one :thumbsup:

[masdog]

Has anyone tried online storage. Adorama has unlimited storage for $19.95/month. You are limited to 30mb per file and to either jpeg or 8 bit tiff but that covers quite a bit for most people

I think I will try it.

Anyone else had any experience?

thanks,
Wes

I don't know if I would trust an online storage system. It would be great as 3rd or 4th backup, but as you said, its only good for JPEGs or 8 bit TIFF. I have a good portion of images that are still in RAW or PSD format that I would have to find an extra storage solution for.

[readingr]

I think I meantioned this recently in the help forum.

From card to HD, where keywords are added to the images.

Images are then sent to second HD and to 2 x USB Drives which spends most of the time away from main PC or in work.

Then they get written to a DVD which when full is then copied to another DVD which is sent to my father for storage in case of fire...

Once written to DVD it is then worked on and the work directory copied to the USB drives every time I do some work on the images.

I am now looking at getting a new server with RAID 0 or 1 not sure which yet.

Roger