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Cloud storage
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External hard drive number three went kaput last night. Luckily I had just backed it up on monday so nothing lost. I seem to only get about one year out of these before they die on me. Initially I started using external hard drives in case the laptop drive went but thats still going strong!
I’ve been keeping everything on one external hard drive attached to the laptop and backing up to a second hard drive that I store elsewhere. Then occasionally backing up photo folders to DVD as well. This all came from having been burned badly once before.Anyone using cloud storage that they would recommend or have any other suggestions for safe reliable photo storage?
Would you not use flikr or photobucket. Or even Dropbox. They are all free storage too. And are always readily available no matter where you are.
Is there any possibility that the quality of the drives you are using is the issue, as 1 year from each does not seem like a lot.
One option is something like the Drobo’s, another is solid state storage although costs still seem high enough. Best backup strategy though I suspect is making sure you have as many possible copies of your images as possible, utilising dvd’s, hard drives, and cloud storage.
the average lifespan of an external drive is actually around the one year mark, any more than that and you are one of the lucky ones.
the only reliable system is RAID, where there are a number of HDDs in series and information gets saved across them all. when one dies then only a small segment from each file is lost. these systems are getting cheaper.
i have often wondered why the focus of technological development does not really seem to include improving the standard of digital storage, none of which could be properly called archival standard.
Thanks all. Yes, I was thinking of making use of the free terrabyte on Flickr. Was just curious to see what other people use. Would be €89.99 annually for 100Gb on Dropbox!
After my last incident, I had bought a pair of what I thought were decent quality Toshiba drives but they don’t seem to have fared any better than the previous WD ones I’ve had. Very frustrating not being able to rely on the storage medium.
Isabella wrote:
the average lifespan of an external drive is actually around the one year mark, any more than that and you are one of the lucky ones.
the only reliable system is RAID, where there are a number of HDDs in series and information gets saved across them all. when one dies then only a small segment from each file is lost. these systems are getting cheaper.
i have often wondered why the focus of technological development does not really seem to include improving the standard of digital storage, none of which could be properly called archival standard.
I’m not so about hard drives only being good for just a year, otherwise we would all be replacing our computers every year. That said, clearly not all hard drives are not created equal, as I’ve never had a computer fail from a hard drive failure, but have had an external one die after a few years a while back.
Re: raid, there’s a few versions of it, including my preference Raid 1, which if using two drives in the raid array, would write all information to both drives as opposed to splitting it between the two. The other versions of raid which scatter the data over several drives, seem to me to be more geared for hard drive data access speeds rather than data integrity, although even with raid 1, you are pretty much insured against one drive failing, after that its squeaky bum time should more than one fail at the same time.
Re: archival digital, not sure what the state of play is with digital archival technologies, but its probably telling enough that Hollywood tends to archive its movies (even ones shot digitally) on film stock.
I think as photographers, we are quite demanding, with backup strategies probably being a lot more manageable and cost-friendly if we didn’t aim to back up all the rubbish we shoot, and instead focussed on backing up what we would actually want to recover in the case of data loss. I’m quite guilty of this, and of all the images I have stored, less than a fifth of them I would more than likely want to recover were anything to happen. My seperation of the wheat from the chaff could be a lot better..
Dropbox and similar services are not really a backup option, you are probably better off with a backup service like Carbonite or Mozy. Carbonite offer unlimited storage for about €60 per year – but they do throttle bandwidth on upload
Gerry
I’m not so about hard drives only being good for just a year, otherwise we would all be replacing our computers every year. That said, clearly not all hard drives are not created equal, as I’ve never had a computer fail from a hard drive failure, but have had an external one die after a few years a while back.
my source for the one year is at Fire in Dublin.
internal and external are not the same… but i have had 2 internal HD’s fail, though as that was so many years ago it probably no longer counts:) externals are subject to all kinds of wear and tear that internal drives are not – bumps/bangs/damp/overheat/power surge. I have had one external die due to irreperable corruption and one is currently inaccessible due to failure of the power cable, conveniently not supplied separately by anyone i have tried so far.
I think as photographers, we are quite demanding, with backup strategies probably being a lot more manageable and cost-friendly if we didn’t aim to back up all the rubbish we shoot, and instead focussed on backing up what we would actually want to recover in the case of data loss. I’m quite guilty of this, and of all the images I have stored, less than a fifth of them I would more than likely want to recover were anything to happen. My seperation of the wheat from the chaff could be a lot better..
the trouble is i guess that one never knows until much later whether or not something may prove to be useful or interesting (apart from the obvious crap!).. hindsight being 20:20 and all that.. could be equated with hoarding i suppose but at least in a small space:) my father was the curator of the city museum, up he used to collect contemporary ephemera for the collection and felt that one had to hold on to everything for at least 10 years before one could even begin to evaluate its usefulness or value.
Dropbox and similar services are not really a backup option
very true.
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