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Where should i store my photos.
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A word of warning: If you are using CD and DVD media for storage you should stay away from re-writable discs (RW) and good practice suggests that you back up the disc/discs every 7 years. :wink:
Just to put the cat among the pigeons again :) 1TB drive here http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=420463 plus €12.50 fpr delivery.
but simply using you guys as an example of many of the photographers in Ireland and another reason why photographic business are closing every day.
“Every day”… 7 days a week, 52 weeks of the year? Is that really the case or is that just an exaggeration?
To be honest I’m tired of this guilt trip that people are being put on, whether it be intentional or not.
Another PI member PM’d me a link to a webshop last week as he was reluctant to post it on the site due to the recent and unofficial ‘support Irish’ campaign.
People gave you a lot of feedback on your recent thread Sheldon and from what I can see you chose to more or less ignore it. That says to me that you don’t see yourself as having to change at all, only us, the consumers. I’d actually be put off ringing your shop for this very reason.
Back to back-up routines … here is what I do:
1. All photos are downloaded to my laptop and viewed/adjusted as required.
2. Every hour, the data drive on my laptop is backed-up to an external hard disk – a separate back-up for each day of the week.
3. Twice a day, an additional back-up is carried out to a separate partition on the same external drive.
4. Two back-ups operate automatically every night:
– the laptop (and all PCs in the house) is backed-up (files copied) to a file/back-up server (an old PC with 1TB of storage) sitting on the house network.
– all files are then copied to a 1TB hard disk that sits on the network (SAN).5. I routinely clear down the old pics from the laptop as follows:
– check that they are on the file server
– copy to a DVD
– delete from laptop.At this point I have three copies of my photos:
– on the file server
– on the back-up SAN drive
– on DVDThere is one weakness: there is no off-site storage (in the event of a fire in the house!), and I am going to have to address that.
Considering that I work from home and my laptop contains a lot of work data, this back-up regime is very important to me. Including photos as part of it is straightforward – as is maintaining back-ups of iTunes and the kids PCs. Plus, remember that once these are set up, they happen automatically, with limited routine maintenance, i.e. checking that there is enough disk space on the network.
A few points to note:
1. Use a good, reliable software . I use SycBackSE from 2 Bright Sparks.
2. Make sure that your back-up software provides alerts/emails if there is a back-up failure.
3. Use only proven and reliable hard disks. Speed is not important for overnight back-ups but is important for retrieving large files.
4. With the relatively low cost of storage these days, I do not worry about compression.
5. Partitioning a disk provides some protection (such as user error as per an earlier example). However, it is still one piece of hardware (disk, read-write herds, etc.), so if a disk fails, all partitions will/could be affected.
6. I don’t know how reliable this regime is in the long-term (e.g. needing to make fresh DVD copies every 7 years), however I have only had one disk failure in my current network – the external disk that I carry around in my laptop of hourly/daily back-ups, but it was 3 years old and had served its purpose well to that point.I have been working woth PCs now for 25 years and during that time I have had very few catastrophic disk failures, however just one is disasterous if you do not have adewuate back-ups. So remember:
Take a back-up;
back-up your back-up;
back-up again.and finally …
Yikes – I thought external hardrives were robust! Will have to check out other options now. What’s the shelf life of an average Ext hardrive then or does it just depend on when it decides to give up the ghost?
Lainey wrote:
Yikes – I thought external hardrives were robust! Will have to check out other options now. What’s the shelf life of an average Ext hardrive then or does it just depend on when it decides to give up the ghost?
Well it is mechanical, spinning parts, moving heads etc. It will wear out based on how much it’s used and the environment it’s in. It’s all very microscopic but it will wear out. The drive experiences lots of heat, turn it off it goes cold, hot/cold expansion/contraction of parts. Think about the electronic parts and the solder contacts, in a bad athmosphere they can come away from a board and cause it to go faulty. This is one form of failure I suffered once and I had a hell of a time getting a replacement board to fit a version of a drive that was no longer made. In the end I sent the drive to Canada for repairs and I can count my luck that it could be repaired at all.
Also to point out that someone else wrote that you can partition a drive so it appears as several drives, thus if one fails the others will be fine, uhmmm nope. If the harddrive fails mechanically then all the partitions are gone too.
Oh what a feeling to lose data and have no backups, that cold blood running from your head. ;0)
Thanks Nossie – so what price range are the Raid 1 devices then and how do they work – does it plug in like an external hard drive?
Entry level Raid drive.
http://www.lacie.com/ie/products/product.htm?pid=11140
We should be able to give savings on the online webprice. I should have some special pricing at Photovision next week.Lainey wrote:
Thanks Nossie – so what price range are the Raid 1 devices then and how do they work – does it plug in like an external hard drive?
Looks like Sheldon has a nice unit there and I can’t believe how affordable they are now. It’s great.
A question for Sheldon; If the unit itself fails, I mean the housing/controller/the box, how easy is it for me to insert the drives into any other unit and retrieve my data? So can I take a drive from this unit and install it in my PC and see all the data again?
Sheldon, that’s exactly something I was looking for.
can I use also replace the original HD? (thinking about future upgrades)thanks
the unit sheldon is showing you is very very good
i have a nas version of one of those
BUT
this is a failsafe NOT a backup
if you run a unit like that, both drives are running all the time and for the same ammount of time
the likelyhood it that the drives will fail around the same time
they are a good way to protect, but not a backup solution by themselves
what they do is give you some level of redundancy
if you are very serious about backing up stuff properly one of the best ways to do it is to use a tape based system
I use an LTO drive and run 2 backups a day on my server with 4 interval friday ones, this gives me a months worth of backups on 16 tapes
with a monthly offsite tape backup too
is there any way to use one HD as ‘working unit’ (constantly on) and the other one as weekly backup?
at the moment I have the internal HD 320 Gb plus one external (500Gb) with time machine on that I switch on every week.
I need something like that, conceptually.dont think so with that unit, but if thats what you want, why not just get 2 externals from sheldon instead
stcstc wrote:
if you run a unit like that, both drives are running all the time and for the same ammount of time
the likelyhood it that the drives will fail around the same time
they are a good way to protect, but not a backup solution by themselves
When running RAID1 it’s a good idea to use 2 different drives from different manufacturers. The idea is that the life expectancy will be different.
I agree you should back up to another media too but it’s a trade off there too between affordable and realistic up to vacuum sealed nuclear bunkers.
As Steve says, RAID was not intended as a backup solution. It’s main intention was to provide increased storage capacity and , depending on the the type of RAID implemented, resilience against a disk failure and maybe a performance improvement. The use of a single RAID device for your data does not provide a backup at all. However, a RAID device can quite happily be a part of a proper backup solution, just as external hard drives or DVDs can.
For most home users, the simplest, most cost-effective backup method is to backup to multiple external hard disks. Back up at different intervals, and for ultimate security keep at least one copy in a different location. 1TB disks are pretty cheap now and easily available.
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