Archiving/backing up

[Reschsmooth]

Howdy all,

Simple question - but what do you all generally use to back-up/archive images?

I have read that DVD-R's are not reliable and CD-Rs seem to be more reliable but obviously smaller capacity.

So, do you use:

1. External HDs
2. DVDs
3. CDs
4. Other?

(I ask this as someone with very limited IT knowledge).

Cheers

P

[Marvin]

Hi!
This has been asked a couple of times before. Here are the links:

http://www.dslrusers.net/viewtopic.php?t=9577

http://www.dslrusers.net/viewtopic.php?t=4438

I personally use external hard drives and also back up to 2 dvds. 1 x tdk armor plated and one normal.

Cheers,
Lee

[Killakoala]

Hard drives are quicker, larger and take up less space than equivelant DVDs or CDs. I use a USB external hard drive and a Netgear SC101 with two hard drives installed for my backups. I also use TDK armourplate DVDs for some back up uses.

Put a price on how important your work is and purchase your backup medium accordingly.

[DStrom]

usb hard drive currently, though I am planning on setting up auto back up to my linux server at some point.

[Reschsmooth]

Thanks for the feedback guys (and the links, Marvin).

At the moment, we have about 50gb of photos (we have only had the D200 for about 5 months and prior to that, we used a compact digital, and therefore very small files).

Our laptop only has a very small HDD which subsequently crashed. Prior to the crash we bought a Lacie 250 gb hard drive we use to store all our important files, primarily images.

My concern was that thad HDD could always crash as well, and wanted at least a 2nd back-up and was leaning towards CDs (as I had read they were better than DVDs) yet their capacity was small, and would require at 3 CDs for one CF (2gb) - having shot almost 3gb in a session, this could end up requiring 4-5 CDs, which creates their own problems in terms of storing them correctly.

So, I may purchase a second HDD and routinely back-up to that and keep it separate from the laptop whilst not being used.

Cheers

P

[Matt. K]

One backup strategy that is often ignored....a fine print. Also be sure to keep one copy of your images off the premises in case of fire.

[Nnnnsic]

Another one is that you could always get your images printed to negatives or positives on film.

[Matt. K]

Now Leigh...that would put us in the situation where the filmies are digitising their film and digities are filming their digitals. Absurd!

[Glen]

Patrick, not sure if you live in a house or unit, I live in a typical federation house and keep some USB hard drives running next to the PC and a couple under the house in the cavity under the floor. Unlikely to be damaged or stolen there but still connected to the PC for fast use. Every so often I copy everything to DVD.

[jben_net]

I use 100-200 gig hard drives that are mirror raided. Once they are full I keep one on site, and one off site. I daisy chain all of them. This works well for me particularly with OSX's spotlight search feature (for finding images with ease)

[jben_net]

Oh, and I use firewire 400 (i've had problems with macosx and raiding firewire800)

I use softraid also because the OS raid has few options and poor support if something goes wrong.

[ATJ]

I have a Linux server under the house with a 200GB hard disk. It is on the network and archiving is as simple as clicking a button which copies everything on the hard drive (in the path I put the photos) which has changed since I last archived to the drive under the house.

[DaveB]

Leigh, at several dollars per frame for decent 35mm film recording (at 11 Mp if you're lucky) you'd need to think carefully about the cost-effectiveness of that. Certainly it's something you could consider as an extra layer of backup for critical images though.

Writing something to film and then storing the film in archival conditions isn't a "fire and forget" solution: with digital copies you need to have systems in place to verify and re-copy files over time, and the same applies to film (although if you trust your storage conditions you might not need to check it so frequently ). If you have the option to recreate the film from digital you should get the same result (obviously duplicating the film directly opens up more scope for loss of detail) so it's something I might consider in conjunction for selected images with a digital archive system.

Given that my archives currently have ~60,000 images (it goes up as I add new ones and down as I cull old ones: I'm a harsher editor as I get older...) I'm obviously not going to do that for all my images!
When on the road my laptop uses an external FW/USB drive for backups, while at home there are multiple terabytes of disks in my storage/backup system (note, that's not multiple terabytes of data at the moment: there are redundant copies).

I learnt the hard way that having copies of your data in two locations isn't good enough: the risks of data loss can drop SIGNIFICANTLY if you have a 3-copy system with no more than two copies on-line at the same time.

[Colcam]

Hard drives are quicker, larger and take up less space than equivelant DVDs or CDs. Put a price on how important your work is and purchase your backup medium accordingly.

Too True! I have a mirrored RAID array of two 200gb Hard drives for the C drive (Which is rebuilding itself after a mini crash on one drive as we speak! THIS is why I have a RAID setup!). About half of my data there. My D drive is reserved for the scratch disk (Photoshop) 150gb. Most of my data lives on a 320gb Drive (E), F: Drive has my Windows pagefile, swap file. H: drive is a 250gb external backup drive (Maxtor one touch) automatically backed up with Second Copy. I am about to add a two x 320gb mirrored RAID array external drive setup to supplement the 250gb H: backup. I take the external drive with me whenever I go away.
Everything is burned to CD/DVD and catalogued with a little programme called Visual CD which allows searches and shows thumbnails of the jpegs and icons of the rest.

For storage, I found that the twin drawer CD storage set from Big W/ KMart at $29.95 holds 120 discs and has a numbering system that I use with the Visual CD application.

I also keep a good hard copy print filed away from the computers.
If I have missed something, let me know & I will try it.

Col

[Reschsmooth]

Thanks for the feedback and info everyone - to be honest, I have no idea about half of what you are talking about (I thought Raid killed flies).

Cheers

P

[ATJ]

Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent) Disks

[Colcam]

Thanks for the feedback and info everyone - to be honest, I have no idea about half of what you are talking about (I thought Raid killed flies). CheersP

Yes! I could throw hard drives at the flies!

RAID is a combination of hard drives which can act as one i.e. when you save a file to the HDD, it is saved to all of the drives in the Array(set) at once so that you instantly have two copies of your data on different physical drives. If one crashes, then the other one will still have the data safe onboard. If, as happened to me yesterday, you get a corruption or some fault on one drive, the Array copies the data from the good one to the other to get them back into sync again. There is more to it than that, but that is the basis of it.
In short, make as many copies of your important data as you can afford by as many different means as possible. YOU CANNOT BACKUP TOO MUCH!!
Col

[avkomp]

I also have my images on 3 servers here (mainly cos I can) 2 of those are running RAID 5 arrays.

I am looking at putting in network attached storage devices (nas) at some sites I look after. These just plug into the network and go.
The devices I am looking at have 4 or 5 sata HDD in them and can make up to a 3TB array (thats 3000gigabytes to the techno challanged.

several companies make these gizmos including thecus.
The 4100s is the current unit which takes 4 sata hdd
the new 5200 series are due out next week with 5 sata hdd.
supports different levels of raid and can be easily integrated into a windows server environment, but just as easily into a home network.
most new computers have a Lan card these days and if not cheap to buy.
these gizmos are expensive, starting around 1000 without drives but protect against disk failures.
dont protect against fire or theft though.

you still need offsite backup too, so all bases are covered.
you can never have too many backups.

I have been called to recover failed servers before and found that they werent backing up, they were but the backups were incomplete or no good etc.

external usb hd are cheap these days making it affordable to buy one, put key stuff on it and move it offsite. just in case.
Steve

[Reschsmooth]

Yes! I could throw hard drives at the flies!

RAID is a combination of hard drives which can act as one i.e. when you save a file to the HDD, it is saved to all of the drives in the Array(set) at once so that you instantly have two copies of your data on different physical drives. If one crashes, then the other one will still have the data safe onboard. If, as happened to me yesterday, you get a corruption or some fault on one drive, the Array copies the data from the good one to the other to get them back into sync again. There is more to it than that, but that is the basis of it.
In short, make as many copies of your important data as you can afford by as many different means as possible. YOU CANNOT BACKUP TOO MUCH!!
Col

Thanks for the summary.

I won't load up this forum with newby IT questions about setting this up, pros and cons, etc.

Cheers

P

[DaveB]

RAID can be good, but you need to understand its limitations. RAID (other than 0) provides protection against disk failure. But it provides NO protection against operator or software failure. If you delete or overwrite a file and then need the original back, bad luck: it's modified the "backup" copies as well.

Also when one drive in the RAID set fails, you must identify and replace it ASAP. Until you do, any hiccup in the other drives will be catastrophic. The good units will let you hot-swap the drive with a new one while the system is running, so software and users aren't disrupted.

To protect against user/software failure you need to have historical sets of data. The fancy systems (e.g. filesystems with snapshot support and OS X Leopard's "Time Machine") do this as part of the filesystem/server by keeping extra copies of only the stuff that was changed, but the simpler systems make duplicate copies of EVERYTHING (but make do with only several rotated archives).

Making a copy of the data onto another set of disks (or tapes, or DVDs, whatever floats your boat) and taking that set offsite provides some protection against theft/fire, but obviously that data can get old over time: regular refreshes are needed as any new data is not protected. The scheme I currently use is based on one primary copy of the data, with a secondary copy on external disks that are connected and synchronised once a week. A third copy is stored off-site and synchronised monthly.

I'm considering upgrading my primary set of disks to be a RAID NAS box (partly so it can also be used by the other machines in the household) but even with that in place I would not want to give up the 2nd copy that sits on the shelf and the 3rd copy that's stored off-site! For me this is not just my photos (which do take up most of the space) but also business and personal data.

[daniel_r]

RAID can be good, but you need to understand its limitations. RAID (other than 0) provides protection against disk failure. But it provides NO protection against operator or software failure. If you delete or overwrite a file and then need the original back, bad luck: it's modified the "backup" copies as well.

My mouse had been hovering over the reply button for the whole thread wanting to say that - excellent advice.

What you've said here Dave is excellent, and provides a solid foundation as an intro to backups.

One of the biggest things to consider with backup is: "If I had to rely solely on my backups at this point in time, how would I feel - confident or shit scared..."
The answer to that will let you know if your backup methods need fixing

[avkomp]

yep, raid doesnt protect against operator error and as said, the smaller units can only tolerate a single drive failure. another disk failure in the array will be catastropic.

good verified backups are your protection against accidental deletion and the like.
I also image my workstations periodically. I use acronis true image enterprise here but it is available in lighter flavours as required.
similar products are around like ghost etc.
I have images of the workstations saved to the servers so that if a workstation gets whacked due to malware or hardware failure, I can restore it in no time
The nas box I will be testing hopefully next week has a 4 port gigabit switch in it also.
network in a box. I may post my review of the unit, including simulated disaster and recovery. Thecus 5200.

steve

[Colcam]

I'm considering upgrading my primary set of disks to be a RAID NAS box (partly so it can also be used by the other machines in the household) but even with that in place I would not want to give up the 2nd copy that sits on the shelf and the 3rd copy that's stored off-site! For me this is not just my photos (which do take up most of the space) but also business and personal data.

Absolutely right boys and girls. Which is why I said to do as many forms of backup as possible.. I too am looking at the multi-disc RAID NAS system as the primary backup in the near future with the offline external HDDs as secondary, etc. I am looking at one from Synology (CS-406e) http://www.synology.com/enu/products/CS ... /index.php but it does not appear to have hot swap for the drives. I can get it for about $1100.00 with two Seagate 320GB SATA drives (it has room for 4).

Any others out there?
Col

[xorl]

RAID is for high availability - if you absolutely must have your files online 24/7 and any downtime costs $$$. For personal use it's expensive and unnecessary.

You're better off using your spare disks to store independant automated backups - that will greatly reduce your chances of losing data compared to RAID. If you can wrangle offsite network backups as well, that's even better. This is becoming more and more feasible for people as networking costs fall. Otherwise having a couple of USB caddies which get rotated offsite is a good idea. If you can make optical storage (CD/DVD) work for you, that's fine too.

Also, if you haven't tested your backups recently you should assume they don't exist .

[Alpha_7]

RAID is for high availability - if you absolutely must have your files online 24/7 and any downtime costs $$$. For personal use it's expensive and unnecessary.

Not *that* expensive considering the cost of 320GB HDs nowdays, and well I guess some people value there personal data or images more highly then others... and then there are the nerds that just do it coz they can.

[xorl]

After buy extra disks and setting up RAID you don't have any backups.. ..so you still need to pay for a backup solution. If I'm spending more money I'd prefer to improve my backup solution to protect my data. Also, if the RAID array is not properly set up and managed you can increase the chance of it eating your data.

There are definitely situations were RAID makes sense, but you don't often encounter them at home.. If you need a very large volume that spans several disks then a properly managed RAID array can be useful. However, it's not too hard to split a very large (>500GB) photo collection across a couple of disks - not everyone needs to make this decision tho' .

[DaveB]

There are definitely situations were RAID makes sense, but you don't often encounter them at home..

As I mentioned, I'm considering a RAID NAS server, but this isn't necessarily so I have a RAID solution but rather that I will have a fast network server accessible to everyone in the house (3 people). Having RAID with hot-swap means that when disks die it doesn't disrupt anything: it's icing on the cake.

Something else to note is that when a 300GB disk fails and you need to go to the backups, 300GB takes a long time to restore (or to make a new complete backup, which is essentially the same thing). As well as dealing with the disruption when the disk dies while you were saving information to it, the disruption is extended by all the re-copying. A good hot-swap RAID system will hide all that from you in the background, letting everyone get on with useful work.

Also, if the RAID array is not properly set up and managed you can increase the chance of it eating your data.

Too true: there are some half-baked systems out there. One thing to watch with these standalone RAID boxes is whether all the volume information is replicated across the disks. For example, what happens when the RAID box itself fails: can you take the disks (or N-1 of the disks) to a replacement and get everything back?