The importance of back ups

Jellycat

Jellycat

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Just wanted to post this up as a reminder of how important it is to back up our work.

For the last 4/5 days lightroom has been running very very slow, taking a full 2 mins to open a photo. I tried everything to fix it, even upgrading to lightroom 5. Nothing worked. Figured it must be something to do with my iMac.

Cut a long story short it turned out to be my external HD that holds all my photos & today it partly corrupted taking with it every photo i shot this year!!!!

Luckily for me I have 3 back up of every photo. I do a weekly backup to an external HD & twice daily back up via Wifi to another external HD & a back up to online cloud storage with backs up every time I add anything new.

So now I'm transferring everything over onto a new HD (just 1 hour left out of 7 lol).

Ive only lost 1 days editing time and not my clients sessions.
 
Glad you're ok, Jellycat!

I recently bought one of the 6GB NAS units and set it up as two 3GB mirror drives. Only £200, but it looks like I'll be needing another soon. All of my final client images are on Zenfolio, as well. I've got it off a switch on the network so I can just bolt each new NAS onto the switch.

I'd like to have an off site backup besides Zenfolio.
 
I have both a Western Digital and a Seagate USB hard drive and back up all my media every time I add significant amounts. In addition, as an Amazon Prime member, I have unlimited storage and upload to there as well.

If there is only one reason for regretting the general demise of film it is the fact that negatives last almost forever without any care at all apart from the initial treatment and storage.

I have negatives going back to 1973 that are unchanged.

One day they will come out with a digital storage device that lasts forever and that time may not be too far away as I read in New Scientist that they are experimenting with data storage based on glass.
 
JennyGW said:
Glad you're ok, Jellycat!

I recently bought one of the 6GB NAS units and set it up as two 3GB mirror drives. Only £200, but it looks like I'll be needing another soon. All of my final client images are on Zenfolio, as well. I've got it off a switch on the network so I can just bolt each new NAS onto the switch.

I'd like to have an off site backup besides Zenfolio.
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If you have good internet speeds then I would recommend backing up your NAS to the cloud instea of using mirrored drives. This way tour NAS can use the full 6GB and its only $5 per month to backup your nas to something like crashplan. The initial upload takes a while though so be prepared for that but once finished you have a proper offsite backup solution.
 
ShinySideUp said:
If there is only one reason for regretting the general demise of film it is the fact that negatives last almost forever without any care at all apart from the initial treatment and storage.
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It might not be mainstream any more but film is still here. And yes, my boxes of negatives are still intact and have never had a back up!


Steve.
 
JennyGW said:
I'd like to have an off site backup besides Zenfolio.
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Zenfolio isn't really a backup, in that it doesn't keep itself up to date. The only cloud backup that I could find allowing nas as well was Livedrive

Eta at a glance that seems to be changed though
 
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Congrats on having a backup plan that worked when you needed it to.

As for mirrored drives in a single nas....Beware of having your backups across multiple drives in a single machine as a hardware failure can take out all the drives.
 
Having just had an issue with my pc (windows 8.1 caught in a boot cycle) and having not yet backed up my recent shoots I was terrified I'd lost them however my local pc superheroes sorted along with another terabyte drive to backup which has been running overnight! Been looking at cloud storage but dunno where to go or who to trust, while keeping it cost efficient!
 
Ballyman said:
If you have good internet speeds then I would recommend backing up your NAS to the cloud instea of using mirrored drives. This way tour NAS can use the full 6GB and its only $5 per month to backup your nas to something like crashplan. The initial upload takes a while though so be prepared for that but once finished you have a proper offsite backup solution.
Click to expand...

Mixed feelings about using the Cloud. You use it? If so, how has your experience been? It would be nice to have all 6GB ...
 
Well this thread potentially saved my backside. I have mirrored drives in my little server and a Crashplan offsite backup. Logged into Crashplan after reading this thread to see how much space I was using....strange...about half of what I was expecting. Dug around a bit and for reasons best known to itself Crashplan software has decided not to backup my 2014 weddings folder despite it clearly being ticked!

I've now resorted to USB temporarily and stored in the car. And it's given me incentive to sort out a NAS in the detached garage as my offsite plan.
 
gadgeteer said:
Well this thread potentially saved my backside. I have mirrored drives in my little server and a Crashplan offsite backup. Logged into Crashplan after reading this thread to see how much space I was using....strange...about half of what I was expecting. Dug around a bit and for reasons best known to itself Crashplan software has decided not to backup my 2014 weddings folder despite it clearly being ticked!

I've now resorted to USB temporarily and stored in the car. And it's given me incentive to sort out a NAS in the detached garage as my offsite plan.
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Wow glad I could help.

If you use cloud storage, check it's working regularly, mine had files missing (thankfully not important ones & no client ones). Luckily like I said I do manual back ups after every session so only 1 personal folder missing (missed it of my manual back ups!)
 
I backup to external hard drive and zenfolio but I also have USB pens which I update and leave with my father in law in Scotland
 
dito to neil_g
i have seen drives on a 2 week old system pack up and quite a lot under a year old go the same way to be safe it has to be at least two seperate drives minimum
 
can you elaborate neil - what is raid and why is it not a good backup idea?
 
neil_g said:
raid, i.e. the grouping/combining/mirroring of disks in a NAS. is not a backup. its a redundancy for drive failures, not for the loss of data.
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so what you mean is because the nas drive is in the same room as the original data it isn't a backup?

The definition of backup in this instance meaning more than just a drive failure backup. So it's not so much the raid part thats the issue? a time machine backup would also come under the same category of not being a backup then right?
 
bertpalmer said:
RAID isn't a backup. It just protects against disk failure.

You aren't protected against file corruption, accidental file deletion, theft or fire.
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now i'm confused - how doesn't it protect against file corruption and file deletion?

theft and fire I get
 
bertpalmer said:
Because RAID, as a primary storage device doesn't duplicate the data. So if you delete it or the file system corrupts there isn't a way of recovering it. Unless you backup the RAID elsewhere.
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i thought we were talking about the nas drive as the secondary device not the primary.

So what I was thinking was you have your hard drive with the data on
then a nas drive as the secondary drive with a copy of the hard drive on (pretty much like how a time machine backup works)

Are we talking about the same thing?
 
CanonDjango said:
how doesn't it protect against file corruption and file deletion?
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because raid mirroring for example is an instant process. as soon as a file is deleted/corrupted in fractions of a second it is written across the disks in the rest of the array.

treat RAID arrays as you would a single drive. as effectively that is what they are but with redundancy in the event of a drive failing (excluding RAID0).
 
neil_g said:
because raid mirroring for example is an instant process. as soon as a file is deleted/corrupted in fractions of a second it is written across the disks in the rest of the array.

treat RAID arrays as you would a single drive. as effectively that is what they are but with redundancy in the event of a drive failing (excluding RAID0).
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I think I understand what you mean. Raid is an exact mirror so whatever you do on one drive is the same on the other drive.

so that isn;t the same as a time machine then which preserves legacy content

are all nas drives raid?
 
bertpalmer said:
Yes time machine is different - you are absolutely right.

No, not all NAS drives use RAID.
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ok so when buying a nas drive if you want to use it as a backup you need to make sure it isn't RAID.

Of course that still doesn't tick the boxes of a proper backup solution though because it's onsite.
 
CanonDjango said:
ok so when buying a nas drive if you want to use it as a backup you need to make sure it isn't RAID.
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IMO, no. As in "that's incorrect".

RAID isn't per se a backup (so if you store your only copy of something important on RAID then you're an idiot) but a RAID box can act as a backup. I.e. use a RAID box in preference to a vanilla NAS as your backup device and you should in theory be better off because you have your working copy on your working drive and your backup on a drive with somewhat more resilience to hardware failure than a regular NAS.

Note that I'm talking about all RAIDs (that I know of) apart from RAID 0. RAID 0 doubles your chance of hardware failure instead of halving it. Somebody really should think of a new name for that kind of RAID.
 
JonathanRyan said:
IMO, no. As in "that's incorrect".

RAID isn't per se a backup (so if you store your only copy of something important on RAID then you're an idiot) but a RAID box can act as a backup. I.e. use a RAID box in preference to a vanilla NAS as your backup device and you should in theory be better off because you have your working copy on your working drive and your backup on a drive with somewhat more resilience to hardware failure than a regular NAS.

Note that I'm talking about all RAIDs (that I know of) apart from RAID 0. RAID 0 doubles your chance of hardware failure instead of halving it. Somebody really should think of a new name for that kind of RAID.
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ok now you have confused me.

If RAID is an exact copy then it's not a good backup for the reasons listed here

neil_g said:
because raid mirroring for example is an instant process. as soon as a file is deleted/corrupted in fractions of a second it is written across the disks in the rest of the array.
Click to expand...
 
What Jonathan said.

As long as you know that a RAID drive can't back up itself you're fine. You can use it as a secondary drive to backup a primary drive. So using a NAS or DAS to backup your computer is really good.

Just don't make the mistake of thinking that because it prevents against hard drive failure, that your data is safe on the RAID only. Because there are other types of data loss.
 
JonathanRyan said:
IMO, no. As in "that's incorrect".

RAID isn't per se a backup (so if you store your only copy of something important on RAID then you're an idiot) but a RAID box can act as a backup. I.e. use a RAID box in preference to a vanilla NAS as your backup device and you should in theory be better off because you have your working copy on your working drive and your backup on a drive with somewhat more resilience to hardware failure than a regular NAS.

Note that I'm talking about all RAIDs (that I know of) apart from RAID 0. RAID 0 doubles your chance of hardware failure instead of halving it. Somebody really should think of a new name for that kind of RAID.
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what he said.

my original post in this thread maybe wasnt clear, i apologise for that. RAID as one part of your backup solution (i.e. a second copy) is fine. as long as your ONLY copy is not stored on RAID on the assumption will keep it safe.
 
neil_g said:
what he said.

my original post in this thread maybe wasnt clear, i apologise for that. RAID as one part of your backup solution (i.e. a second copy) is fine. as long as your ONLY copy is not stored on RAID on the assumption will keep it safe.
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right!

Ok but what about even if it is your second copy and you delete a file you weren;t supposed to delete - doesnt the raid drive instantly delete it too so you you then can't get that file even off of your backup?
 
ShinySideUp said:
One day they will come out with a digital storage device that lasts forever and that time may not be too far away ...
Click to expand...

Actually, I think that time was around 12-14 years ago, when Kodak trialled an archiving service for digital photo files. But alas, from what I remember of reading about it in the BJP at the time, apparently very few snappers were taken with the idea of archiving their files on film ...
 
We've just made some final tweaks to our backups to include cloud.

NAS with all Weddings on
External Hard Drive which syncs from NAS every 2 hours
Cloud backup from above Ext HD
2x off site portable hard drives
Lightroom Catalogs stored in google drive with backups on External Hard Drive

Once that system fills up, we will replace the NAS drive with a new one.
 
CanonDjango said:
right!

Ok but what about even if it is your second copy and you delete a file you weren;t supposed to delete - doesnt the raid drive instantly delete it too so you you then can't get that file even off of your backup?
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It depends how the data gets to the RAID drive. It isn't a mirror of your primary drive; it's up to you how the data is copied from one to t'other. In my case I have a RAID1 (mirrored drives) in my PC then four drives in a RAID5 in my server. Files are automatically copied overnight to keep the two in sync. But because, as has been said, RAID (even two of them) is not a backup, I back up the PC to a selection of external drives at regular intervals. I should really keep those external drives off-site to be properly protected.
 
ShinySideUp said:
One day they will come out with a digital storage device that lasts forever and that time may not be too far away as I read in New Scientist that they are experimenting with data storage based on glass.
Click to expand...
Archival quality DVD has been available for some time and is used by the British Library. Dell was selling it as an option but I don't know if it's still available. Okay, a little limited in capacity but a good start.
 
Sorry I am being so dense on this subject. I feel I dont really even know what RAID is to be lost!

Can someone help untangle these two points for me

Snapsh0t said:
But because, as has been said, RAID (even two of them) is not a backup
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JonathanRyan said:
a RAID box can act as a backup.
Click to expand...

What I am confused about is that some comments indicate that RAID isn't a backup. Full stop. Then others say it can be if used right.

My questions are

1) if RAID isn't a backup then what's the point in having it at all
2) if it can be a backup then how should it be used to do so properly?

sorry for being dense
 
I have all my photos backed up on several media, 2 free cloud services, DVDs, Blu-Ray (Metal) and HDDs.

In that scenario even if everything in my house was destroyed by fire etc, at least some copies of all my photos would survive.
.
 
Frankly I've always worried about RAID - it may be good in a server farm for helping to secure redundancy but as a backup solution I would rather utilise the individual drives as external backups as and when I needed them.

Putting all your eggs in the RAID basket has never seemed a good idea.
'
 
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