How do you store all of your photos in the age of digital photography?

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TheBiles

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Quentin
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I'm rather paranoid about keeping all photos on a single HDD in event of some catastrophic failure (it doesn't help that I'm in engineering and very familiar with possibilities). When you have hundreds of GB of photos, how do you store them securely? I'm currently keeping mine on my computer and backed up with an external, but I'm starting to run out of space on the computer and looking for a more completely external system. What do you guys do?
 
neil_g said:
hi quentin, there have been quite a few discussions on this recently to be honest it may be worth a quick search :)
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Ah, didn't notice the search feature on the Android app!
 
I back up everything on 3 drives. Looking at switching to RAID soon with an off site backup to another RAID over a network.

Its one the things you have to keep an eye on with digital and one of the reasons it isnt as 'FREE' to take photos (well take and keep them) as a lot of people seem to think.
 
lensflair said:
I back up everything on 3 drives. Looking at switching to RAID soon with an off site backup to another RAID over a network.

Its one the things you have to keep an eye on with digital and one of the reasons it isnt as 'FREE' to take photos (well take and keep them) as a lot of people seem to think.
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Ouch! don't mention RAID, it's as bad as Basil Faulty saying 'Don't mention the war' to his German guests........:naughty:

The 'techies' ( I use the word loosly!) will have you....:bat:
 
I use a HP Proliant Microserver with two 2tb hard drives.

The server cost £140, £240 with £100 cashback from HP (offer is on until the end of Arpil). and the hard drives were £120 for both.
 
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Howi said:
Ouch! don't mention RAID, it's as bad as Basil Faulty saying 'Don't mention the war' to his German guests........:naughty:

The 'techies' ( I use the word loosly!) will have you....:bat:
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:weneedarolleyessmiley:

he said 2 RAID devices so thats fine ;)

(and can you use the term "loosly" towards someone with 12 years experience?)

not that youre baring a grudge or anything.
 
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Howi said:
Ouch! don't mention RAID, it's as bad as Basil Faulty saying 'Don't mention the war' to his German guests........:naughty:

The 'techies' ( I use the word loosly!) will have you....:bat:
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With good reason though, as some people think RAID is all you need to make your data safe and secure. RAID is useful, but certainly not the be-all and end-all.
 
Hi I am a bit OCD about backing things up especailly pics as you can NEVER get them back or replace them. I store mine on my comp and back them up to my external HD and then DVD's and I keep my external HD and DVD's in different places :lol:
 
Miss Moo!! said:
Hi I am a bit OCD about backing things up especailly pics as you can NEVER get them back or replace them. I store mine on my comp and back them up to my external HD and then DVD's and I keep my external HD and DVD's in different places :lol:
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I'm terrible like that too!!!

I have all my photos on my laptop and then on 3 different external HDDs :cuckoo: :bonk:

I'm even thinking of getting another external HDD and leaving that at my parents' as an offsite copy :lol:

TBH with the price of storage these days there's no real excuse not to.

A friend of a friend had the baby pictures of two if his kids on a laptop. His wife dropped the laptop and the HDD was fubar'd. It cost £700 to recover the images.

When you can buy 2TB of storage for around £120 or 2 portable 500GB drives for £80-£90 it's gotta be the better option ;)
 
Does anyone have any experience with network attached storage (NAS)? I think that may be a viable solution after saving up in the future. Are they basically just mini-severs that I can access via IP from anywhere?

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NAS is basically an external drive with network utalising an embedded operating system allowing various levels of remote access depending on price. RAID is a no brainer as hard drive problems are the most common point of failure. Personally I used to use an external usb drive with raid1 and use acronis 2010 to handle backups. Quite a bit quicker than backing up over my network.take a look at lacie or startech.
 
I'm think of getting a drobo that can handle dual redundancy. I have raid 1 in my pc but I've had issues in the past with 2 drives going at once and the raid being unrecoverable :( It's not cheap thou!
 
I have a great system where my macs back up to a 2tb drive on my network via time machine, this then mirrors itself to an identical drive connected to my parents router (they don't know what it is just that try must not turn it off) :-) this all happens at 3 in the morning so as not to steal our bandwidth
 
I don't bother with RAID. RAID is simply a system you would implement to maintain maximum availability and up time - it's not a backup system. I simply backup onto an external hard disk when I've uploaded new photos. The chances of two disks with different running times failing at the same time is very small indeed.

As for keeping the photos in a seperate place, well, to be frank, in the case of a house fire there are a lot more other things I would be concerned about. Bummer about the photos, but as long as my loved ones and, hopefully, I get out that's all that counts.
 
TheBiles said:
Does anyone have any experience with network attached storage (NAS)? I think that may be a viable solution after saving up in the future. Are they basically just mini-severs that I can access via IP from anywhere?

Sent from my HTC Glacier using TP Forums
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theyre a good idea, but remember you want at least 2 copies of your data at all times. a NAS (RAID or not) is still only 1 copy.

synology would get my vote. excellent kit.

lacie i would avoid, their kit is over-rated for what it is and our design dept seem to keep killing theirs.
 
neil_g said:
theyre a good idea, but remember you want at least 2 copies of your data at all times. a NAS (RAID or not) is still only 1 copy.

synology would get my vote. excellent kit.

lacie i would avoid, their kit is over-rated for what it is and our design dept seem to keep killing theirs.
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Nas with raid is two copies.

(Sent from my HTC Desire using TP Forums)
 
Slaphead said:
I don't bother with RAID. RAID is simply a system you would implement to maintain maximum availability and up time - it's not a backup system. I simply backup onto an external hard disk when I've uploaded new photos. The chances of two disks with different running times failing at the same time is very small indeed.

As for keeping the photos in a seperate place, well, to be frank, in the case of a house fire there are a lot more other things I would be concerned about. Bummer about the photos, but as long as my loved ones and, hopefully, I get out that's all that counts.
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You know, photographs are the first thing that people save in a fire after their loved ones are safe.

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I go for a copy on my laptop, another on a 1Tb external HDD and then an off site copy on DVDs kept locked in a drawer at work. Difficult sometimes due to the numbers of photos taken but I like to make all the copies before I reformat the card/s.
 
ziggy©;3605536 said:
Nas with raid is two copies.

(Sent from my HTC Desire using TP Forums)
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if youre talking about raid1 mirroring then no not really...

kinda at a push in the sense that if one drive fails you still have the other drive.

however its not in the sense that if you delete a file it is instantly deleted from both drives, data corruption likewise is instantly written to both drives etc. its still a single physical device so vunerable to most of the same hazards as a single hard drive.
 
raid is to protect against disc failure of critical systems - its not a fail-proof backup solution despite many people using it as such

I terms of important things in life - we recently had a pretty bad break-in and malicious damage - thankfully nobody was in and when I got to the house the one item I removed was the portable harddrive with our sons baby pics on. They are irreplacable - very little else falls into that category IMO.
 
Slaphead said:
As for keeping the photos in a seperate place, well, to be frank, in the case of a house fire there are a lot more other things I would be concerned about. Bummer about the photos, but as long as my loved ones and, hopefully, I get out that's all that counts.
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Not sure my clients would be so understanding if I lost their images though.
 
Slaphead said:
I don't bother with RAID. RAID is simply a system you would implement to maintain maximum availability and up time - it's not a backup system.


I've replaced 3 drives so far this week in raid1 arrays suffice to say if the data was on a single drive the data would be lost. Your correct its not a backup but a raid1 array as a backup makes sense.
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pmaccyd said:
I've replaced 3 drives so far this week in raid1 arrays suffice to say if the data was on a single drive the data would be lost.
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wheres your backup though? what happens if someone deletes data on those disks? or the data becomes corrupt?

our SAN at work has 2 levels of RAID, 1 at a hardware disk group level and 2 at the VDisk level as a VRAID and it still gets backed up to an LTO3 tape library..
 
Sounds like your assuming the raided backup drive only holds one backup of your data. I used acronis which created snapshots at regular intervals. If a drive fails its simple to replace the drive and still retail you acronis backup history. I now use a MAC and use time machine which is a bit more seamless. Tape drives are expensive and I think outside the scope for home users. Small 2.5 inch portable drives would be more cost effective for a home user. As with all IT there are plenty of ways to skin.
 
pmaccyd said:
Sounds like your assuming the raided backup drive only holds one backup of your data. I used acronis which created snapshots at regular intervals. If a drive fails its simple to replace the drive and still retail you acronis backup history. I now use a MAC and use time machine which is a bit more seamless. Tape drives are expensive and I think outside the scope for home users. Small 2.5 inch portable drives would be more cost effective for a home user. As with all IT there are plenty of ways to skin.
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i was assuming yes but you said the data would be lost so thats how i got to that conclusion :)

my point about the backup tapes was that even with raid you (not aimed at you, just anyone concidering raid) should have at least a 2nd copy of the data on another device. whether that is another raid device, usb/sata/fw hard drives or optical media as raid is not designed as a data backup method :)
 
I think so many people just don't realise the consequences of a failure and loss of all images/documents etc. I use my PC for editing etc but images are backed up on 2 USB harddrives - like you say if one were to fail (has happened to me before) then I still have another copy. Storeage is so cheap (£50 for 1TB!!) so for me it's a no brainer.

Cloud storeage (online) is another possibility but given the size of images and speed of broadband it's not really viable for me.
 
RAID is not a backup method. It really is as simple as that. If you think otherwise, you're not understanding it.
 
Simple solution for me: regularly back up (using Apple's time machine) to an external hard drive connected via USB. Once back up is complete, unmount and turn off the hard drive.

Hard drives suffer terribly from heat, so it's important to keep my drives cool (ie off) when I don't really need them. I only fire them up about one a week.

I also backup via a manual copy method to another external hard drive (not using Apple's time machine or any particular backup program - just a file copy and paste). This ensures that if my Mac dies and I go back to PC, I can get my pics back without access to Apple's time machine.

Finally - my really important pics I upload to flickr/Picasa Web, so if my house catches fire and my hard drives burn, I've got those special memories stored away for retrieval.
 
clicktor said:
RAID is not a backup method. It really is as simple as that. If you think otherwise, you're not understanding it.
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I do understand it, all I do is Server hardware/software support. Don't think we will agree but hey that's life..
 
I've two Synology NAS. One locally setup in RAID1 (mirror) and the other at my in-laws with rsync backups occurring automatically every night.

I RAID for protection against drive failure locally, and off-site backup to cover house fire/burglary.

It's not ideal, but works for me and was easy to setup..
 
Someone asked the same question in another forum. My response is here.

For simplicity, here it is again:

I absolutely do NOT believe in "free" storage. It's simply not reliable for backup purposes. The absolute most important thing to consider is how reliable your backup is. If it's not 110% reliable, then it's not a backup.

Flickr doesn't do RAW files.

There are MANY possible backup solutions out there though.

You can try Amazon S3 as they are relatively cheap, and highly reliable.

I would go for Rackspace Cloud Storage though:

Cloud Files - Unlimited Online Storage & Data Storage Services

Now, you'd need to check out whether it's the kind of thing that's right for you, BUT, you are not likely to find anything, anywhere that approaches the level of reliability and quality that you will get from Rackspace.

Rackspace has a much better value proposition than Amazon S3. They have a better network, better CDN, and better prices even. (I freaked out when I first saw their cloud storage as it really is all that.)

From their page:

UPLOAD FILES TO THE CLOUD
Store and manage unlimited files using our online control panel, desktop software, or programmatically via the API. And even manage it on-the-go via your iPhone®, iPad® and iPod® touch.
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Their cloud storage uses the Akamai CDN (content delivery network), so it's pretty much the fastest network in the world.

It's not free, but it will give you peace of mind knowing that you've got your files safely stored on perhaps the world best network with the best service provider.

(I am NOT affiliated with Rackspace. I have used their services, and from a lot of experience, I know that they are the GO TO people for reliability.)

But, that's cloud storage. You need to ask yourself if you're comfortable with that.

NOTE: I am in IT and am not a professional photographer. My recommendation for Rackspace is purely based on "data safety" from an IT professional perspective and not what happens in the photography industry.
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It might be overkill for some people to backup there though. However, it is off-site, and it is reliable. And at $0.15 per GB? It's darn cheap.

Anyways, just one option and just my $0.02.
 
as per the "cloud" topic in the talk photography section.. online options are nice if you only have a few GB, i wouldnt like to spend time uploading my catalogue. or indeed trying to recover it in a hurry. i'll stick to external hard drives taken to work.. quicker, easier and probably cheaper. plus im happy knowing where my data is and knowing access to my full catalogue is a 30 min drive away.
 
neil_g said:
as per the "cloud" topic in the talk photography section.. online options are nice if you only have a few GB, i wouldnt like to spend time uploading my catalogue. or indeed trying to recover it in a hurry. i'll stick to external hard drives taken to work.. quicker, easier and probably cheaper. plus im happy knowing where my data is and knowing access to my full catalogue is a 30 min drive away.
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Yes. For large amounts of data, it can be slow to upload/download. Cloud storage like that is better purposed for *backups* in case of a disaster, like a fire burns down your studio/home. But as I mentioned, it's likely overkill for a lot of people.
 
Super Simple said:
Someone asked the same question in another forum. My response is here.

For simplicity, here it is again:

It might be overkill for some people to backup there though. However, it is off-site, and it is reliable. And at $0.15 per GB? It's darn cheap.

Anyways, just one option and just my $0.02.
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$.15 per GB is more than double the price of buying your own storage. I got my 1.5TB external for $99US.

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