How are your digital photos saved?

<p>With the rise of digital photography at its peek, and picture resolution becoming so great, the file sizes are growing exponentially!<br>

My question to you will be:<br>

How do you aggregate, maintain and secure your photo albums? </p>

<p>Do you implement a designated external data storage solution or do you post it to the cloud and hope for the best?</p>

<p>My answer would be to do both, and here's why. <br>

With the cost per byte decreasing rapidly, it's common to find 1TB drives at or under $50. This makes storing your files and photos locally as easy as a plugable device. There are many brands, most are reliable, some are prone to failure. Combine you data storage solution with cloud storage like and you have data redundancy.<br>

What are your thoughts?</p>

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<p>DAM book: 3-2-1 rule, 3 copies, max 2 in the same place and 1 on different media (optical drive). <br>

I still compromise this a bit: 3 HDD copies on 2 and/or 3 TB usb drives. Main/workable copies in the PC, 1 usb drive backup next to the PC and 1 copy stored away in a different place. <br>

I will only loose all copies in a major incident, in that case I have other worries than the photo collection. </p>

<p>My internal and external hard drives (DAS) are synced via software (Syncback Pro) to my NAS, a 5 bay Synology unit. The NAS also has a synchronizing software service that will duplicate its data to various cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Amazon. I chose Amazon and about to stop my Crashplan subscription because it is so much better. So, in a nut shell, I open the Syncback software on my desktop, click "Run" and it synchronizes my DAS hard drives to the NAS. The NAS recognizes that new data has been added and it automatically syncs to Amazon. It's pretty slick and within minutes of new data on my computer, it's backed up in two other places and one of which has a mobile app that I have access to. </p>

<p>+1 to Jos van Eekelen.</p>

 

<p>The good one? Save them on multiple location and I<strong> print them</strong>. I never thrust a computer or any digital stuff. Actually, you real photographs are the print, NOT a digital file.</p>

<p>I don't see cloud storage as a serious solution for me. - 2TB @ 9 Euro / month would be among the better deals but still a lot of money that could buy me a 35mm Leica lens or maybe even a nice DSLR like the 5D Mk IV. And it isn't just renting the storage, you also need bandwidth to access it. Changing my ISP / contract would add 2 fancy f2.8 zooms to the 5D / D810. - Adding up payments for the rest of my imaginable lifetime and visualizing them as desirable objects is my way to keep my wallet shut, YMMV.<br>

External 2TB HDDs are 80 Euro, so you get 3 for 2 years of cloud renting and it isn't unrealistic to expect them to kind of last 5 years. - With 3 copies you can procrastinate replacements until they are needed. <br>

Upon NAS: I'd get started, when it makes sense technically. - I guess that point isn't reached before you piled up 3.6TB of image data worth preserving in total, or the point where you have to start a<em> 3rd</em> <em>line</em> of external HDDs.<br>

I'm sticking to the rule of saving a card to two PCs before I erase it and also try to ditch my data (yes, RAW files first) on friends & family. <br>

I don't have the need to be really organized yet. - I will surely weed out external HDDs some day with software looking for multiple copies of the same file, that might exist after saving multiple Laptop HDDs on the same external drive.</p>

<p>Everything on three drives, including one off site. Cloud doesn't make sense for me, as I archive around 1TB per year. (My career files around 9TB right now.)<br>

Multiple drives much more cost effective, but if I was a hobbyist, I would also use the cloud. (All my client hi-res are in the cloud btw, but not RAWs.)</p>

<p>I primarily run Lightroom. <br>

Internal hard drive - main data files. <br>

2nd internal hard drive with SyncBack - only for backup. <br>

Two external hard drives with SyncBack. <br>

Looking at doing another hard drive offsite. </p>

<p>No cloud storage. </p>

<p>-Jos- I like the 3-2-1 idea, but it may not scale very well.</p>

<p>-Eric- Pulling out the big guns with the 5 bay NAS!! Very nice, I assume that's RAID? What level RAID?<br>

I'm not familiar with Syncback software, I'll have to research that. Does it offer deduplication of data?<br>

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-<a href="/photodb/user?user_id=831118">Bela</a>- Does that not add up in trees? Printing off.. LOL also trying to pick at the digital photographers too :) Play nice! ;)<br>

-<a href="/photodb/user?user_id=640949">Jochen</a>- I understand that. In many areas, cloud storage is managed differently with different incurred costs... :( Not the best idea for the future. Being organized is best practive though. That way when it becomes necessary it is almost second nature with no real adjustment in how you handle operations. <br>

-Ian- I hope you have a good handle on that 9TB!! That's a ton of data!!! <br>

-Ray- That's #2 for syncback being recommended... Must be worth looking into! </p>

<p>Looks like a majority consensus is expand when needed. This seems to be best practice as you grow out! Awesome, thanks for all the responses! This was a great first post experience! <br>

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<p>SyncBack you set it so. Drive A to Drive B. If some files are in B. But you know A is accurate. It will delete any files that is in B that is not in A. The standard way is that it will align A and B together. So the files in B will be duplicated across to A and vice versa.</p>

<p>When I started out I didn't use RAID because if you deleted a file by mistake it gets mirrorred across. You can go for stripe RAID for speed but I didn't need that and with the extra expense required (and the risk but the risk a lesser factor for me). It was just unnecessary for me. I think redundancy RAID is good if you must minimise the downtime so the other drive kicks in so your system still works ... but this computer is just a hobby for me.</p>

<p>I have a SSD as my boot/software drive and I have a normal HDD for my data. So if my data drive blows up, I could just use the other internal (backup) drive and use that or get one of my 2 external drives. Cos the files are synced ie - copy and pasted across. They don't use any specialised software or process. If my computer blows up, I can take the drives out (or the external ones) and plug into another computer and my files are readily available. </p>

<p>-Ray- So it's essentially RAID 1 or mirroring the drives with SyncBack acting as a raid controller? I also have a SSD as a boot drive and a 1TB data storage drive that I store my videos on. It's very stable but takes a few minutes to point everything in the right direction. </p>

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<p>-Eric- Pulling out the big guns with the 5 bay NAS!! Very nice, I assume that's RAID? What level RAID?<br>

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<p>Hi Joe, I use a Synology unit with 6TB WD Red drives and run them in Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR) which is their raid 5. I've had one WD Red get a bad sector report (it still ran and held data) but I replaced it anyways and mailed it off to Western Digital and they replaced it, no questions asked. I really like WD.<br>

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<p>Everything on three drives, including one off site. Cloud doesn't make sense for me, as I archive around 1TB per year. (My career files around 9TB right now.)</p>

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<p> <br>

Do you have a slow connection, Ian? I don't understand the correlation between cloud and the amount of data you create. I just let it trickle up to Amazon and Crashplan. Initial back up takes awhile, that's for sure!</p>

<p>Joe - hmmm ... unlike real RAID it is not real time. You can set the software to do regular runs of the syncing jobs. Each hour or each evening or each week. But having said that Windows you can use software RAID which is real time. </p>

<p>The thing I don't like about real time RAID is that if you accidentally deleted a file your other backup is screwed too. At least when it is when you run it you have some time. Same if you got hit by a virus.</p>

<p>That's true about having real time data stored to RAID. That is why it's imperative to have a data management plan. Having daily, weekly, and/or monthly backups ensure recovery at any level of corruption. Daily backups ensure the "oops I deleted a file" can be restored and weekly if you discover that "oops" later or discover a virus.<br>

RAID works best at handling data over multiple disks and maybe not so much as "THE" backup strategy. Granted it is a storage solution.<br>

RAID (depending on the level) mitigates a failed drive, or as Eric brought up, failing sectors. It distributes or mirrors sectors to alternate sectors spanning multiple disks.<br>

Ray as you stated, if a virus were to propagate through a RAID'd storage array, the cleanup would be lengthy at best and a total loss at worst.<br>

My point is this, backups should be implemented to negate a total catastrophe. If you're running RAID, taking a weekly backup of the data on the RAID disks should be backed up off site. Be it cloud or another drive.<br>

Also, to save drive space and if your backup software can handle it, implementing snapshots can greatly decrease the size of data being retained. Although, snapshots work best on VM's.</p>

<p>I have a drobo box with five 2 TB drives. It appears as one drive to my desktop computer, but it distributes files and backups across the 5 drives so that if two drives stop working, I will not loose any files. All of my keepers are uploaded to my Smugmug account. For panorama and HDR photos, I upload the original components as well. This should work as long as I'm mentally competent enough to manage the system. For the several thousand family photos that are worth keeping beyond my lifetime, I am distributing them to as many family members as possible. </p>

<p>I shoot about 1 roll of B/W a week and the scans are not very large. Large enough for an 8x10 with room to spare for bigger if I wanted but I do not. But I store the digital files on an external and on my PC. I print out about 1/3rd of that. Just the prints are important to me and would not really lose any sleep over the digital files. They will go poof when I am dead anyway but the prints are good for a couple hundred years. My kids will want the albums. After that who knows what the Grand kids will want. But it's just up to them. I will be handing down my parents prints and my Grandparents and have photos from the late 1800's for them to cherish or toss in the trash. </p>

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<p>Very nice, thank you all for sharing!</p>