What to use for backups

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ltchippy

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Ok, so i've been taking pictures for a year or so now and whilst i don't have loads there's a lot that i don't want to lose. So far i've just been backing up the most important ones onto a DVD-RW, but want something that will handle much larger volumes going forward.

I have a windows 7 laptop with a photo library of about 30GB. An external HDD of about 500GB would seem the obvious solution to me as this should allow enough room for growth over the next few years for photo and video.

Does anyone have any recommendations on makes/models of external HDD, or a good source of material to research them?
 
DVD is not a backup that is a copy.

Buy some HDD's with an external connector (I have known many occasions where the external HDD that come in a case fail, due to cheap soldering of connectors). You can then connect by USB or ESATA.

Remember though if you make 1 backup and keep it in the same location you still lose everything. Get 2 drives keep one with a friend and rotate them.
 
Good call re the external connector, i wouldn't have thought of that.
 
Or having a second in a seperate location come to think of it.. This photography lark isn't cheap eh!
 
With backups its a trade off between having something easy and something safe. I prefer to have one easy backup, permanently connected to my iMac and backing up automatically every hour and one safe backup, a hard drive which only comes inside the house to get backed up. My best processed jpegs are uploaded to my website in full size too.

With regards to media I mainly use LaCie drives.
 
I have two 2Tb external HD drives. One at home and one at the office where I back up every week. I also have a 500gb hard drive that I use to back up to daily (from my laptop). Once I have done a shoot I download to the laptop and make a further copy on the 500gb hard drive. I do not format my CF cards until I have also backed up onto one of the 2Tb HD drives.
 
Coming from an IT background, you can never have too many backups. There is nothing worse than having a computer fail on you only to find that the backup is also sketchy or hasn't been completing properly. This is all followed by a blind panic of how you're going to recover the data.

For large scales there is software available that will email you reports when your backup completed but its probably a better idea just to do it yourself if its just your own work. 2 backup drives is a good idea, one on site, one off site somewhere else in case of breaks ins/fire. To have 3 drives fail or 2 seperate properties burn to the ground in 1 day is one hell of a bit of bad luck.

Despite all the preaching i have just done, i have no backups of my own computer :lol: i'm looking at a decent sized backup drive then burn each outing/shoot to a dvd or something to keep as a separate library off any kind of hard disc. I've spent too much time trying to get data back from customer's hard drives that hasn't been backed up and i know its a sketchy business to say the least!
 
Thanks for the advice guys. Always useful to hear how other people do things. I think for now i'll start off with a single external hdd for regular backups and then upload finished jpegs online. I'll then look to get an second hdd to keep off site at a later date.
 
as long as you have multiple copies with at least one offsite you should be okay.

i wouldnt use dvd personally, they can rot if not stored correctly. hard drives are probably best mb/£ (although prices are high at the moment due to supply issues), as for makes everyone has their horror stories. personally i wouldnt touch maxtor (just based on experience of a high physical drive failure rate) or lacie (our design dept manages to kill lacie enclosures at a rate of knots).
 
We've always used western digital and seagate as a rule but i could tell you horror stories about both of these manufacturers. My boss' Seagate drive that came in his £1600 Imac died after 4 months with a complete unrecoverable failure. The point i'm making is that they can go at any time, regardless of price. WD and Seagate just tend to be better than others we have used (Maxtor for example) but unfortunately theres no such thing as a perfect drive :(

Another thing to bear in mind is be careful with your backup drive, so many people just throw them about in handbags or whatever. They really can be delicate, some will take knocks until the cows come home but others will fail after the smallest knock. Essentially they work like an old record player, reading the information off the disc with a needle so can be upset quite easily.
 
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How many backup hd's from the original backup hd should a person have and where do you draw the line?
I understand from a business point of view, photographer or otherwise that a lot of your business depends on what data you have stored and if it was lost then you business could be in dire straits therefor the need for multiple backups.

As for the hobbyist photographer who does not do photography for a living and does not have a office, or is able to keep and use a secondary or further backup hd at the workplace, how many backups should they have?

If I use 1 external hd for my backups should I get another just in case the internal or external hd breaks down? where do I draw the line or should I just wait until my external had is almost full?
 
frank said:
How many backup hd's from the original backup hd should a person have and where do you draw the line?
I understand from a business point of view, photographer or otherwise that a lot of your business depends on what data you have stored and if it was lost then you business could be in dire straits therefor the need for multiple backups.

As for the hobbyist photographer who does not do photography for a living and does not have a office, or is able to keep and use a secondary or further backup hd at the workplace, how many backups should they have?

If I use 1 external hd for my backups should I get another just in case the internal or external hd breaks down? where do I draw the line or should I just wait until my external had is almost full?
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like i said, you should always have at least 2 copies of your data across 2 physical devices/media (RAID counts as 1). ideally taking 1 copy off site in case of fire/theft.

hard drives do fail, but the chances of 2 failing at the same time are low.
 
Probably a good idea to have a backup of the backups you did of the backups you have that you backed up when you done the first backup from the original backup!!
 
I use 3 external 2TB HDDs and rotate them.

Critical files back-up automatically every 4 hours to one drive. At the end of each day it is swapped with the second one from a fire safe and the first back-up of the day is carried out immediately. Every 4-5 days one of these drives gets swapped with one I keep at another location and the whole process starts again.
 
Three is a good way to go, but remember too they are useless all the same location. I keep one in work, one in house and one in flat, that way you have bases covered.
 
I've just started backing my photos up to Blu Ray discs instead of DVD's as you can get about 6 times as much on the same sized disc (or more on a double layer disc) and as the price of Blu Ray hardware is starting to come down it's economical too. Plus I can pop them in my player and see my pics on my 50" hdtv. Very nice monitor if you ask me.
 
My 2c - all my most important stuff is on an external drive. It's copied once a week to another drive that is kept elsewhere in the house. A drive of identical capacity but different manufacturer is at my mother's house (120 miles away). Periodically I switch them over (it took a while to get her to stop bringing it back here "you left this behind") so even if the house burns down here, I've lost less than about a month of stuff...

Why drives from different manufacturers? - well I've been in the IT game long enough to have seen Seagate's "revolutionary new drive lubricant" (which turned into a tacky glue-like substance that stopped drives spinning up about 30 minutes outside warranty), the IBM "DeathStar" range and a couple of other tedious total drive-loss scenarios...

I follow the "3 rules of backups" : Backup! Backup! Backup! - you can always chuck data away, but you can't magic it up from thin air.
 
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