How are you backing up your photos?

Avotius

Avotius

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So it occurs to me that having my photos on two different hard drives is not really enough to be a real backup so I am wondering what solutions the Rangefinder minded folks are using.

Yes yes film and all that but I have thousands of dollars in scans and hundreds of thousands of digital photos.

I have seen there are online solutions but in fact where they claim unlimited storage (such as carbonite) they dont really give you that, if you go over what they consider a large amount they arbitrarily cancel your subscription. Not to mention our upload speed is caped at 60kps and we rarely get that speed anyway.

DVD's are not a choice for me because I have seen far too many data DVD's go bad over a not very long time and also I would need a bazillion of them and a place to keep them, plus the humidity problem here etc etc etc.....

I have been considering some sort of hardware backup like a Drobo or the sort. Also been thinking about one of these network storage things but dont really understand how they work yet.

Anyway....how are you dealing with this problem?
 
Everything exists on three matched hard drives, one of which is kept in another location on the other side of the city, in case my house burns down.
 
I put my negatives, very carefully, into acid-free sleeves and store them under the bed in a big box ;)


Good question for digital users though - how permanent is any form of backup, and how many copies do you need to be "safe"? At the moment, I only have 2 copies of the few digital files that I have made, big external HDD and DVD.
 
Avotius said:
So it occurs to me that having my photos on two different hard drives is not really enough to be a real backup so I am wondering what solutions the Rangefinder minded folks are using.

Yes yes film and all that but I have thousands of dollars in scans and hundreds of thousands of digital photos.

I have seen there are online solutions but in fact where they claim unlimited storage (such as carbonite) they dont really give you that, if you go over what they consider a large amount they arbitrarily cancel your subscription. Not to mention our upload speed is caped at 60kps and we rarely get that speed anyway.

DVD's are not a choice for me because I have seen far too many data DVD's go bad over a not very long time and also I would need a bazillion of them and a place to keep them, plus the humidity problem here etc etc etc.....

I have been considering some sort of hardware backup like a Drobo or the sort. Also been thinking about one of these network storage things but dont really understand how they work yet.

Anyway....how are you dealing with this problem?
Click to expand...

I suppose you are somewhat correct now that I think about it.

I presently have my image data on 2 drives but they are in the same location. Still, storage is so cheap these days (eg under $100 AUD for 1 terabyte pocket drive and about the same for a 2 terabyte "big" drive) that its not a big deal to keep a back up drive at another location offsite.

I honestly do not think that any more sophisticated back-up is needed in this situation. After all, many major IT systems still rely on daily tape backups of their key data. There is seldom need for a "hot" backup and recovery facility (ie one that involves replicating data in real time) - certainly not for what we are talking about. I simply do not bother with DVDs these days for all the reasons you gave. Plus that HDD storage is cheap as well as convenient and stable.
 
I had two external HD developing data-reading problems from one minute to the other. None of them was abused, exposed to voltage spikes heat or similar and out of nothing data became unaccessable. I could recover the data from one of these HD but only partially from the other and it were mostly files of digital images...

Finding a reliable and affordable data back-up solution would be essential for me before I would even start thinking about the X100, a NEX or the M9.
 
Get ready...

I store my files on my main internal drive, these are synced without loss to an external drive. By without loss, I simply mean that when the sync happens it copes new files over but will not delete any files from the external. This external sits next to my Mac.

This external is very high speed, and syncs itself to my server which is in another room. This server has mirrored copies of everything and every night syncs with my servers at work. These servers have multiple redundant copies and are backed up to tape which is vault stored every month.

This entire process is automated, the software which does it is my own and is part of an ongoing archiving system I've been writing for a while. Digital Archiving is of interest to me, which is why the pictures are stored as RAW, TIFF and PNG and are also reduced to what is essentially plain text. At home I just have the RAW files, all the conversions are done on my servers at work.
 
Main data drive in the PC (separate from the system drive). Main backup to a separate drive in the PC, done daily at 0600. Second backup to an external hard drive, every couple of days. Third backup to a compact 1T portable hard disk (WD Passport) that is also run every couple of days, and lives in my bag. I don't feel confident that this is totally disaster-proof, but the multiple redundancy is comforting.

With the rapid growth in my storage requirements I've been replacing hard drives every 12 to 18 months, so I don't think my drives will wear out from old age! :) Next step will probably be a NAS or similar with a set of several 2T disks in a RAID array, but I'll keep the portable backup option running. I use the freeware version of SyncBack to run my backups, because the backup it produces is a simple copy of the files - no special software needed to read the backed up files.
 
External USB-drives. I had them configured so that I only had to push 1 button on the drive and it backed-up new and changed files automagically. And I did have a disk crash on my computer and was glad I had the up-to-date backup!
No off-site backup yet.
Some of my negatives are scanned too, so enyoy the digital backup, but most of them just sit is sleeves, hoping the cupboard won't crash.

Dirk
 
DVD-RAM was designed for archival storage, with both extended lifetime and better recovery from failing media. But the (archivally superior, as the grease from finger prints is the most common starting point for plastics rot) caddied drives are getting hard to find nowadays.

As far as strategies go, I save relevant images to two DVD-RAMs (stored in different places) and keep two external duplicates of the work disk (one out of home again).
 
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I use a removable hard drive. Just one. So far onto my second which is just about to fill up. I only plug it in when I need to back up and it sits on shelf.
 
My work software manual states there are only two types of people: those who have lost data and those who will. Larky's solution looks close to exhibiting the right amount of paranoia, as does Chris Crawford's. The National Library in Australia had a contribution on this in a recent Australian photographic mag. Triple redundancy seemed to be the minimum required, but even then, regularly accessing the drives, and indeed, individual files is crucial, as is regularly turning over the drives. Printing important photographs and storing in archival boxes might be the only secure way to keep an image for more than 15 years.

I backup my MB Pro by Time Machine to a Time Capsule, manually to two external hard drives just for photos all at home, and at work to the server, which mirrors to another internal hard drive and then alternating to two Lacie 1TB external hard drives by FireWire 800, one of which goes home with me alternate nights after work. I am still worried and am never up to date with printing important images.
 
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I'm a mildly paranoid computer geek but I don't do anything fancy. I have my photos on one big HDD and backup every now and then to a second drive sitting next to it (using rsync). I have an additional two disks off-site that I update less frequently.

I don't think the importance of storing a complete backup in another physical location can be overstated. I still cringe every time I see someone's only backup sitting next to his or her computer.
 
Thanks for the info, lots of stuff here to consider.

Anyone using an online cloud solution? I looked at google's thing but I would be using a minimum of 200 dollars a year to do that and it is not really for what I am planning on doing. Sure it would take months to get all my stuff into the cloud but it might be worth it as the off site solution.
 
My next big move is to upgrade to a drobo - it's a good little machine. Maybe keep 1 or 2 extra HD's offsite for environmental protection.
 
I'm not too concerned about data loss, so I do only minimal backup. My MacBook Pro is backed up with an external drive once a week using time machine. The external drive is at my office.
Things got complicated lately because I ran out of disk space in my MBP so I began to "outsource" older or not so important photos on a 2nd external hd that is in sync with a 3rd external hd (2 and 3 at my home).
With that every file is on two hard drives.
 
Working files are on a NAS (QNAP) in a RAID 1 configuration. I always build a RAID 1 with drives from two different manufacturers - Seagate & Western Digital - as buying two drives from the same manufacturer at the same time is likely to get you drives from the same production run with the same problems.

I store files in sequentially numbered folders that are no more than 4.3GB each. I regularly copy these files from the NAS to two individual internal drives. As each folder reaches the 4.3GB size I burn them to 2 Taiyo Yuden DVDs; I dont label the disks but place them in labeled sapphire cases. Each set of these DVDs are stored in separate locations.

So all up, 6 copies across 4 drives and 2 DVDs...
 
while there are many good strategies mentioned so far, one thing to consider - someday it may all change when the disk format you're using goes out of favor. then you more or less may have to migrate everything to a new version of the same system.

i've got 3 main computing systems in my past, 2 of which are near-impossible to read media from without actually firing up the old hardware.

not to discourage, just pointing out that there are extra steps to long-term digital archiving that haven't happened to us (yet) so much in the film world - likely since the introduction of proper archival negative sleeves.
 
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