Recommend me a back up picture storage solution ?

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suggs

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Harry
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Think its time i got myself some sort of reliable external storage for my increasing photo collection, i run Windows 7 so can anyone recommend me a storage/backup solution that's going to work easily and at a reasonable price..

thanks
 
were you looking online storage or external hard drive stlye? i used a western digital external hardrive. Never had issues!
 
yes external hard drive, i also use Flikr but think i should get the pics of my pc and on to a bigger drive..

was thinking a 500gb should be enough for now
 
Im useing a 2 terrabyte Freecom data tank, plugs into my usb port is fast and reliable, cant remember how much it cost but it wasnt a lot, Im running it on Windows 7 64bit with no problems
 
I would get a 1TB or larger, not that much differnce in price to 500Mb external drive. I have a couple of WD's that have worked fine
 
You have 2 options these days

USB or network.

USB is you have to (or have the option to) carry it around to the computer you want to use it on.

With network, you can stick it next to your main PC or next to your router and access it from all the computers on the network
 
You might want to consider some place like scan.co.uk, ebuyer or similar instead of PC World. I don't know what their situation with hard drives are, but every other PC component I've seen available from them is outdated, and incredibly overpriced.
 
Indeed with the USB and Network Hard drives,

I use a 2TB Western Digital Network drive, and a 2TB 'Elements' USB drive.

I use the Network drive to store all my photos, and the USB drive is for backups. What makes this quite useful is that they are both WD and work really simple with WD Backup, just select files and location, and it will run automated backups every week/month/whenever. Very unintrusive.

My Network Hard drive has been running now for almost a year non stop with no problems (other than dodgy router)

Rich
 
Good shout by Smeghead - I had a quick look there as this looks like a good idea for me too. Amazon seem to have these for a load less than PC World are selling them for.
 
ideally you should have at least 2 copies of your data at all times (2 external hard drives for example (NOT raid mirrored)) preferably with one of those copies taken off site if the worst should happen to your house.

use something like allway sync or robocopy to keep them all up to date.
 
Thanks

With the network drive, does it plug into the routers Ethernet port then transfers the data/pictures via wifi from any computer on the system? And then plug another portable drive into the network drive so to have 2 copies of every thing saved?

Cheers
 
WD is a great brand and quality. Just got a 2TB but I think it's too slow for my 18Mp RAW images and will go for what I should have done which was two 1 TB housed together running in SATA raid 5 or 6. That's two drives sharing the files simultaneously (part file written to one drive and part written to the other drive) to increase speed
 
DucDuc said:
WD is a great brand and quality. Just got a 2TB but I think it's too slow for my 18Mp RAW images and will go for what I should have done which was two 1 TB housed together running in SATA raid 5 or 6. That's two drives sharing the files simultaneously (part file written to one drive and part written to the other drive) to increase speed
Click to expand...

raid 5 requires 3 disks and raid 6 requires 4 ;)

either way i would not trust all (i.e. a single copy) of your data to a raid array. it would not be unheard of for hardware errors to kill all data. and it doesnt protect you against common corruption or deletion.

same with the drobo :)
 
I will never use raid again. If the controller fails you have 2 healthy drives and no way of reading them unless you can track down an identical controller to read them. I didn't lose anything but my backup is now to an old PC with NTFS drives that I could pull out and read on another computer if I had to.

I agree 2 copies of data is essential. I maintain 3 copies because it is a bit worrying if your backup device fails and you are back to a single copy. One bitten twice shy. I lost 3 months work in the early days of computer use in my business once. Never again.
 
I've just uploaded a selection of some of my favourite pics at full res to my flickr pro account, and set them to private. Are there any flaws in this plan? :)

edit: as well as backing up to external HDs of course
 
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RobertP said:
I will never use raid again. If the controller fails you have 2 healthy drives and no way of reading them unless you can track down an identical controller to read them. I didn't lose anything but my backup is now to an old PC with NTFS drives that I could pull out and read on another computer if I had to.
Click to expand...

You striped

if you mirror (the sensible method) you get 2 identical discs that you can pull out and use on any machine.

Never stripe, you split the data between 2 discs, any failure and you lose it all.

You can stripe if you mirror as well (RAID 1+0), so stripe 2 drives and then mirror to another 2 drives.

Or RAID 5 and RAID 6 are available, but no real need unless you are enterprise level.

If you can Mirror with a hotspare. If a drive fails, it will be replaced automatically and you have 2 copies of your data again. You can then replace the dead drive and use that as the hot spare.

Always keep an offsite copy. Even if its taking an Ext HD to your parents house or work.

I will shortly be using Robocopy across a VPN. Take all the files over as an initial seed and then just use robocopy to mirror any changes.

Automate your backups - You always forget to backup just before a fail, its called sods law. If you backup automatically, you will never forget.
 
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striping gives you quicker write times and thats about it. Read times are improved with mirroring. Only stripe if you are a speed demon. You have to back it up to be sure.

(Striping is amazing with SSDs!!!)
 
Dale_d3100 said:
striping gives you quicker write times and thats about it. Read times are improved with mirroring. Only stripe if you are a speed demon. You have to back it up to be sure.

(Striping is amazing with SSDs!!!)
Click to expand...

you lose 50% of your disk with mirroring though, i prefer the increased space and happy with the single disk redundancy personally :)
 
You lose 50% of space, but you immediately have a backup of ALL your data.
 
nothing wrong with being a nerd :D
 
I have Synology 2 bay (2 x 1tb) NAS here (RAID 1 mirrored), then a USB external drive attached to the back of the NAS for a further copy of all the RAWs.

I then also use PicasaWeb to keep a jpeg copy of everything online (google storage, 80gb for $20 per year)

The beauty of the NAS over a single usb hard drive is that you can get to your files from any PC/phone/media player etc on your network at the same time.
With the USB drive, you are restricted to the single computer the USB drive is plugged into at that time.

Granted, NAS drives cost much more, but you get so much more functionality out of them.

And also, uploading to something like PicasaWeb means you get view your pictures over the internet no matter where you are. (on your phone etc...... if thats your thing)
 
Here's a 'pro' view from Chase Jarvis - a website with lots of interesting stuff to look at...me I have a second internal 'copy' drive, permanently attached external drive & a portable drive and don't delete anything from my cards until there is a copy on all the above & believe it or not, I never lost a photo ;)

Paul
 
Dale_d3100 said:
You lose 50% of space, but you immediately have a backup of ALL your data.
Click to expand...

RAID isn't intended for and nor should it be used/relied on for backup. It's designed use is to provide resilience to systems so that a disk failure doesn't stop work. A faulty controller on a mirrored system could lose you all of your data. Raid has its place for system resilience but that's all.

External USB hard disks are cheap and provide a decent backup solution especially if, as Neil suggests, one copy is stored off site.

Western Digital 1TB USB drives are available from Amazon for around £45.
 
if you can RAID mirroring to protect you in case of failure, that's backup, by basic logic.

It shouldn't be your only backup though as its in a single location.
 
*sigh*

RAID gives some system resilience and only that. It isn't a backup nor is it designed to be - the single point of failure is the controller. A copy of your RAID data on another device would be a backup.

I feel your pain, Neil ;)
 
Oh I know that - risk management is a big part of what I do. If someone wants to accept a carefully explained risk even though there's a cheap and simple method of mitigation then that's fine. :D

I was just sympathising ;)
 
Islander said:
Oh I know that - risk management is a big part of what I do. If someone wants to accept a carefully explained risk even though there's a cheap and simple method of mitigation then that's fine. :D

I was just sympathising ;)
Click to expand...

no i know.. it does get annoying when people insist mirroring is a backup when used as a single point of storage.

a RAID array is a single point of storage, it offers zero protection against any sort of deletion, corruption, controller based hardware failure, fire, theft, flooding.. etc etc. unless used in conjunction with another separate physical storage device(s).
 
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