Backup Solutions?
- This topic has 22 replies, 11 voices, and was last updated Aug 4, 2009 at 6:04 pm by
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So my external firewire drive is about full, and i need to look at some other solutions to expand, and also implement a bit more all encompassing backup solution.
Option 1: Looking at Drobo drives for onsite storage/backup running some sort of backup software. I need to research the ability to pull out one of the drives and swap it with a drive stored off site to solve that problem. This is a bit expensive but seems to provide some long term benefits with the expansion capability. Drawback is it ins’t portable.
Option 2: pickup a couple 1 TB firewire/usb drives and run backup software or disc syncing software. These are getting real affordable, down close to $100.
Get the Mac. 😉
Seriously, after a recent scare where I lost some VIP raws from a BIG shoot for a new client, my working life flashed before my eye’s and I’ve had a tighten up of the system.
I now work on a couple 17′ Mac Pro’s, one older and a new one with Time Machine.
The new Mac is where all the photos live and the older one is a back-up on location and is used for email and web to lessen chance of getting a bug on the new one.I have a small 500GB USB drive for Time Machine so I can carry it on the road or store it in a safe place at home.
It’s a daily procedure now if there’s been any changes on the laptop.When shooting I have a pair of Rugged Lacie drives that I back-up on in tandem, that leaves me with 2 copies on drives (in different locations ), 1 copy on the Mac and a set on cards until the next shoot.
After an edit/process/delivery the shots are burnt on a set of DVD’s and another copy is made on a TB drive that never has anything deleted off it. (on too #5 now)
This means I have 1 copy with the client, and 2 in my office.
We’ve also now started makingwww.dsaphoto.com
A picture is thousand words that takes less than a second while a thousand words is a picture that takes a month.
2 TB Lacies plus numerous older drives and Time Machine, Toast and a big box of filed DVD’s.
Get a Mac mate. I use a 13 inch Mac book 90% of the time now, may have to upgrade with my next camera but its a wonderful little contraption.
Morsie
Something I always seem t wondering about.
My daughter recently sent my external flying off the desk. The shell survived, the drive didnt…Lost all my back up data on it. Ran to the store and 30 minutes later I was backing everything up on a new TB Maxtor.
Question for those of you using 13inch Mac books, which I seem to reading more and more often. How on earth do you process your files on a screen that small?
I’ve pretty much decided that when this machine ( quad core, ram up the ying yang, smoking hot, sexy box,……….when new) starts to go Im switching to the dark side.
Vistas a freeking nightmare, I’m running registry mechanic weekly, scans every 3 days, constantly trying to clean start up, and still the things slowing down more and more, crashes occur with bridge daily, and on and on.
Makes me wondwer how MS stays in business.
Been thinking the same things myself – I run two PCs here, one for “regular” work, and one for all things photography. Relatively happy with my backing up solutions at the moment….running XP, will not go near Vista.
But I keep thinking about changing the photography PC over to a Mac – how hard would it be to use a Mac and a PC together if that makes sense ? My brothers make feature films and would never dream of using a PC, in fact all book and magazine people I have ever worked with run Macs. Makes sense to perhaps run all photo processing here on a MAC, or not ?
Eric – I have been using a Drobo for a while now, with 4 x 1TB dirves in there, giving me roughly 2TB of available storage. Good machine, seems to work fine, but it only works via USB2 with my PC, and not with Firewire 800 as advertised, at least not on my machine (and I have a Firewire 800 card in one of them – roll on USB3). Not a perfect machine if that makes sense, very occasionally Drobo will sort of switch itself off and you have to manually restart it etc. – but cross figners touch wood it is keeping my data safe. Easy to remove and swap drives etc, pretty cheap for huge storage.
But then of course I run backups off the Drobo to other, single 1TB drives – I had to give up on DVDs a while back, not great for loads and loads of RAW files, plus I had some fail on me over time. Perhaps when recordable Blu-Ray becomes really cheap and usable this will be a good way to have another back up solution ?
On the road – ultra-portable laptop, back up hard drive etc, copy to both.
In the end, if my multiple back ups all decide to blow up at the same time, it’s time to drop out and go fishing !!
Eric – apologies, just checked……. 4x 1TB drives in my Drobo gives me roughly 2.7TB of actual storage. I think the rest is used for backup etc.
We use a Hewlett-Packard NAS that’s daisy-chained to an older USB 2.0 Western Digital hard drive. The HP NAS can talk to the all-Mac network just fine; I have it connected directly to a switch, which is then connected to an Airport Extreme, so all the computers on the network can get to it but it stays behind the firewall. (Not that anyone has proven any truly nasty Mac exploits yet).
The NAS can technically do mirroring, but I usually just keep a local copy of anything important and then back everything up to the NAS drive. Anything older than about 18 months I will move over to the NAS; my work may be a little atypical, though, because I tend to do a lot of shooting for a given story, then once that story’s run the likelihood of needing those photos again (for print purposes, anyway) goes way down. That’s the luxury and the curse of being primarily a writer rather than primarily a photographer.
I have only ever lost one important RAW file that I needed later, and the lo-res copy of that image that I still had ran in the Drake this month anyway (it’s uncredited; a shot of a fly looking at a live mayfly).
I’m not sure a heap of softwear is really anything more than an over-complication of a simple process with backing up photos. ?
You can just copy shoots over in folders to a couple hard drives.
www.dsaphoto.com
A picture is thousand words that takes less than a second while a thousand words is a picture that takes a month.
Ah, fair enough – needing to constantly dig back into the files changes everything..
Maybe Time Machine is the answer, though you would want to be sure that your CAD files are OK with the compression..
FWIW, the local importer of the DROBO thigy is a friend, and he say’s they’re very reliable..
www.dsaphoto.com
A picture is thousand words that takes less than a second while a thousand words is a picture that takes a month.
What i would like to know about it is if i have 2 drives in it, can i swap out one of the drives every month or something and will it automatically rebuild the data? Henry, any idea on that?
Yes it will. It has data redundancy built in so that if any drive goes it will be rebuilt. Think of the Drobo as a fancy RAID setup.
We were using SyncBack here at work for a while and it worked out pretty well. There are a ton of features in the pro version. You can target single directories. You can also exclude or include files as needed. It will do versioning etc so you can have working copies of the same file.
Get the Mac. 😉
Seriously, after a recent scare where I lost some VIP raws from a BIG shoot for a new client, my working life flashed before my eye’s and I’ve had a tighten up of the system.
Turns out I had the ‘lost’ raws on a TB drive, but it was at my wife’s computer because she had to find an older shot while I was away on a job.
So what I need to do now is go through all the drives and label them and maybe list the dates of the back-ups so It’s more clear if one is missing because they mostly all look the same..
Man, this is going to get messy when in a few years.. 😉
www.dsaphoto.com
A picture is thousand words that takes less than a second while a thousand words is a picture that takes a month.
I use SyncBack to run my automatic backups each day, seems to work great, and like Rich says, there are loads of options to make it work for you………
I would be interested to know where technology is going to go with regards to huge capacity storage – filling up increasing numbers of hard drives with back ups etc. is surely one day going to become a real problem as files get larger and larger. As David says, keeping close track of what is on them and not on them is not always that easy, especially as you store more and more data.
For starters, roll on USB 3 – it drives me mad how long it takes to copy large files of images between computers and hard drives etc, especially when Windows XP is having a slow day.
I am not the hardcore photographers you guys are but I am looking backup solutions.
Drobo – I like this solutions but but it’s pricey. Someone above mentioned pulling a drive to take offsite. Drobo is a RAID device, so pulling a single drive for off site wont get all your data. It’s not designed for that.
Mozy – I am trying the Mozy pay plan out. I have about 60Gb of Music, Photos, and other data that I back up. The initial run took about 10 days. Mozy throttles your connections, and that allowed bandwidth is less than my cable modem provider. I assume that the download to restore all the data would take about the same 10 days. They keep deleted files for 30 days. If my computer does not “report” in and try a backup, I don’t know how long they keep the files. Maybe for as long as I am paying I would hope. The thing I don’t like about this, is there is so much out of my control.
Linux box – I have been considering this. Build another machine, with several drives. Use Linux and some RAID software to provide disk redundancy and run a product called Bacula. It would work a lot like Mozy, but the Linux box would be my own server. Bacula has clients for Windows to push backups to the server.
I am also using a USB drive in addition to Mozy just because I am paranoid about losing data.
Those that say Time Machine is the solution, using Time Capsule, that’s just a external hard drive right?
-wayne
Externals can fail at teh drop of the hat ..I have lost 3 in 2 years ..2x Lacie and one segate (sic) using Western Digitals now but for my use I am thinking of just buying a few externals and backing up to them every now and again …Worst thing would be theft i guess ie some scrote pinching the comp and deciding to take the drives with them ….
What i would like to know about it is if i have 2 drives in it, can i swap out one of the drives every month or something and will it automatically rebuild the data? Henry, any idea on that?
Yes it will. It has data redundancy built in so that if any drive goes it will be rebuilt. Think of the Drobo as a fancy RAID setup.
We were using SyncBack here at work for a while and it worked out pretty well. There are a ton of features in the pro version. You can target single directories. You can also exclude or include files as needed. It will do versioning etc so you can have working copies of the same file.
Keep in mind that with a two disk config the raid configuration must be a raid 1. If it is set two raid 0 it won’t have any data redundancy and all data is lost (or atleast most of it) when a disk dies.
The downpart on a raid 1 config is that you can only use 50% of the total disk volume or the volume of the smallest disk.
My own WHS just fried out the motherboard so i’m also looking for a new storage server solution. Personally i’m going for a raid 6 solution with a hardware controller, this alows me to crash 2 Disks at the same time and still have all my data.
Hey Olle,
The Drobo is more RAID-like than a RAID. Data Robotics uses a system they call BeyondRAID. You don’t have to know anything about RAID. The data redundancy is always a feature of the device. It also supports using drives of different sizes. The latest version of the Drobo also supports two simultaneous failures.
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