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santanu

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Santanu
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Guys please suggest me one good and safe external storage hard drive. I got thousand of images in my laptop and dnt want to loose it in any case. There are so many hard drives available in Market but not sure which one is the best for photo storage purposes. I use apple laptop.
 
I’ve been looking at those on the Apple Store site. Not cheap as you would expect but would be interested to hear which way other Apple users have gone.
 
Solid state drives are the way to go! imho
But are very pricey compared to regular drives of the same capacity
 
artyman said:
I use a couple of Western Digitals, seem to work fine. I also burn all RAW images to DVD's as a backup.
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Like Ken I also burn all my original JPEGs to DVDs.

However I have just had a Western Digital 1TB internal drive fail after less than one year!

When checked with HD Tune it showed large areas of bad sectors so even new drives aren't perfect!

In all fairness I have never had a drive fail so quickly, however it CAN happen.

I also store a lot of pics on Hotmail's SkyDrive (25GB data for free).

.
 
you can't go too OTT with backups IMO.

I've got the files on my macbook which is backed up to an Airport Extreme. I also have a NAS that has RAID (2 drives that mirror each other) that also has the files on there.

And of course thats not enough as what happens if your house burns down??? So I have a drive that I leave at work and bring back to update after new projects and if its anything important like a wedding I also keep the final set of unwatermarked JPG's on dropbox.

So all in all I have 6 copies of important stuff. Call me paranoid but at least I know I'm covered.

And for the record in the last 15 years or so I've had 3 drives fail. One resulted in losing god knows how many GB of MP3's (not really an issue) and the other was a drive on my old NAS (wasn't RAID but luckily got 99% of stuff back) and more recently a drive at work... managed to get it all back too but consider myself to have been lucky on the whole.
 
I put mine on a DVD before even sorting them out so I keep the originals. Second computer has a secondary hard drive which also stores albums, the third option I use is yet another external hard drive for those "mustn't loose" photos.

Realspeed
 
Don't buy your hard drives from Apple as they tend to be a bit expensive. I've found Warehouse Express to be good value for money.

Don't forget though you may need to reformat the external drive for use with a Mac, if you want to use the Mac filing system. LaCie now do external drives that detect the OS of your system and format them for you automatically.

You can never have too many backups :)
 
Chappers said:
Don't forget though you may need to reformat the external drive for use with a Mac, if you want to use the Mac filing system. LaCie now do external drives that detect the OS of your system and format them for you automatically.
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shouldnt need to. OSX can read and write to NTFS you just need to punch in a few commands.
 
Not had too much experience of external HDs, but I recently bought a Western Digital 1TB, so I'm hoping it will be reliable. However, the more threads I read on this subject, the more worried I become - far too many people complaining of HD failure for my liking. I realise any HD can fail but I'm now thinking of a back-up for my back-up, which just makes my headache worse.
 
I would never put all pics on one big drive. Better to have several smaller drives than one or 2 large drives.

As for DVDs, well, they can deteriorate over time and sometimes end up corrupted after a short time!
 
cam1986 said:
I would never put all pics on one big drive. Better to have several smaller drives than one or 2 large drives.

As for DVDs, well, they can deteriorate over time and sometimes end up corrupted after a short time!
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it doesnt really matter what size they are as long as you have at least 2 copies on at least 2 separate drives.
 
petersmart said:
If you want to keep an eye on the state of your HDs you can download HD Tune:

http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

I use the free version about once a week to keep a check on mine.

.
Click to expand...

running it once a week i would suggest is too often, it wouldnt be unreasonable to suggest it could introduce additional "wear" on the drive.

any SMART enabled drive and system should give you as much as a heads up on a failing drive as you should need. but then you should already have multiple copies of your data so it shouldnt really be a worry ;)
 
cam1986 said:
I would never put all pics on one big drive. Better to have several smaller drives than one or 2 large drives.

As for DVDs, well, they can deteriorate over time and sometimes end up corrupted after a short time!
Click to expand...

Whilst I agree with this, you can mitigate matters a little by using quality "archival" discs. Something like the Delkin Gold discs.

Anthony.
 
Staff edit: Moved to correct section

DVD/CDs are rubbish as a backup medium especially if you ONLY have them.

I use a pair of ext drives which I revolve weekly keeping one at work PLUS everything is backed up to my server AND important files go to web storage too.
 
cowasaki said:
Staff edit: Moved to correct section

DVD/CDs are rubbish as a backup medium especially if you ONLY have them.

[..]
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Whilst I agree that using them alone is er.., unwise; as part of a multi-storage regime, they do have their uses.

Anthony.
 
I've seen many threads on photo backups and it got me wondering......


What did people do with film ?


Did you make copies of the negatives & keep copies on multiple sites incase of fire & attacks from mutant space goats etc, or is this all a modern digital paranoia :thinking:
 
mrgubby said:
I've seen many threads on photo backups and it got me wondering......


What did people do with film ?


Did you make copies of the negatives & keep copies on multiple sites in case of fire & attacks from mutant space goats etc, or is this all a modern digital paranoia :thinking:
Click to expand...

You are right that we can all get a bit obsessive but...

1. Negatives could/can be stored in fireproof safes (years ago I worked for Kardex and we did several models of data safes* for things such as floppy drives/negatives and other precious goodies)

2. It is easy to make multiple copies of digital information therefore easy to store several copies for safety's sake. The current spate of fire bombings do show things can happen to premises unexpectedly.

3. For mutant space goats I would suggest just hiding under the duvet - they soon go away.

* not to be confused with fire safes for paper files which have a different action altogether.

Anthony.
 
mrgubby said:
I've seen many threads on photo backups and it got me wondering......


What did people do with film ?


Did you make copies of the negatives & keep copies on multiple sites incase of fire & attacks from mutant space goats etc, or is this all a modern digital paranoia :thinking:
Click to expand...

I'm guessing that as the "cupboard" under the stairs rarely self combusted,
or has the "blue screen of death", taking out the vacuum cleaner, walking boots, dogs bed, and the "family album",
back ups of photographs were not really considered
a priority :shrug:
 
It's the threads of ...

copy on PC
.
and
.
copy on network drive
.
and
.
RAID IS NOT A BACKUP
.
and
.
copy on NAMAS certified DVD
.
and
.
copy on USB drive stored off site
.
and
.
copy on the Cloud (but only on a paid for Server Farm)


that got me wondering :D
 
Film is different. Apart from not being prone to self-destruction, nobody will steal your files of negs, and you're unlikely to carry them about and leave them on the train like a laptop.

In addition, a print is in itself a copy but with original trannies it was common to get high quality dupes made (an art in itself, and an expensive one) and use that for reproduction to save risking damage to originals.

Basically I've never lost a neg in decades and they're very enduring when stored properly, yet everyone has had a hard drive crash (or will soon ;)).

Edit: I think this obsession with multiple back-ups might reduce soon, when those 'solid-state hard drives' get more affordable. As I understand it they're basically like giant memory cards which are extremely robust in terms of data retention.
 
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HoppyUK said:
Edit: I think this obsession with multiple back-ups might reduce soon, when those 'solid-state hard drives' get more affordable. As I understand it they're basically like giant memory cards which are extremely robust in terms of data retention.
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i doubt it, even an SSD can potentially fail..

no matter what media a single point of storage is foolish.
 
I back all my important photos to 2 500gb hard drives as well as staying on my computer, the 1 harddrive then gets moved to my fathers house, just incase of house fire etc (heaven forbid) tempery files of half edited images are also backed up onto a flash drive for extra safety!
 
Failure rates for SSD drives are similar to HDD at the moment last I heard.....technology is still to mature to a point where it is suitable for backup use.

Personally I've had rafts of drives over the years. A few tips :

1) No one manufacturer is more reliable than another. They all go through phases where a particular model or batch is prone to failure. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deskstar , Seagate had a bad year, WD have had poor periods. I'm not aware of a manufacturer that hasn't had reliability problems.

2) 2.5" drives appear more robust (as you would expect, with them being primarily for laptops. I have two Freecom Toughdrives that have both been dragged around the world in the bottom of bags, dropped, had drinks spilt on, and generally been abused, that have absolutely no right to be functioning.....but they are. I've had a few 3.5" external drives and they have always died.
 
I would get a NAS with 2 drives fitted in RAID 1 mode.

It all depends on how important the data is to you.

@mid_gen - we have had 3 Toughdrives die on use this year :'(, currently using seagate Go Flex drives.
 
m3csl2004 said:
@mid_gen - we have had 3 Toughdrives die on use this year :'(, currently using seagate Go Flex drives.
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Just goes to prove one of my points....manufacturer means little...they all have duff batches/models from time to time :(
 
neil_g said:
which wont help you if you delete/corrupt something or the whole lot gets trashed.. ;)
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Use the NAS to backup the laptop, not as a single means of storage...


I must say we do get through portable hard drives at an alarming rate, but they are used alot for imaging client machines, and then I transport them in my cycle bag, so probably my own fault. :(
 
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