Backing Up Your Work?

<p>Since 2007 I have been backing up my work on External Hard Drive and DVD. At this point I have too many DVD's and considering using Hard Drives to back up Hard drives. Actually, the price of DVD's have gone up and they are slow as molasses, you get more GB's per dollar with the Hard Drive. Despite that I think the DVD would be less prone to failure. </p>

<p>Is there anyone here backing up their Hard Drive with other Hard Drive. The last thing I want to do is lose info, but the DVD's are piling up! I would appreciate any input for or against this method.</p>

<p>Derek</p>

<p>Derek, I feel your pain! I have continued to use DVDs as well as a RAID hard drive for backup, along with another separate set of hard drives for my images. Since I am a professional and people have a reasonable expectation that they can come back to me months or years later to get files, I feel that I have to make sure as best I can that files will be there and be useable when the need arises. So far, knock on wood, I haven't had any major back up failures that I couldn't cope with, and on a couple of occasions I have been grateful to have the DVD back up. Some people keep talking about the cloud, but the terabytes of images I have and the internet connection I can afford make that unrealistic.</p>

<p>I'm not really sure quite what you mean here, but if you're asking whether anyone backs up information on their primary drive ( normally internal but sometimes external) onto another hard drive ( mostly external) the answer must be yes, zillions.<br>

Frankly at today's image sizes and at the rate at which some people photograph with a dslr, DVD's ccan't really be considered as a primary backup medium any more IMO.</p>

<p>Never used DVD as a backup medium since I consider them not safe (aside from being slow and cumbersome). Always used hard drives as backup - the key is to have multiple backups and in case a drive fails, to get a new one and put on it what was lost on the failed one. </p>

<p>I use two hard drives as back up. One is connected to the computer, getting copied to every night, the other is at a friend's house several miles away. I rotate them every week. I have had hard drive failures but have never lost more than a day or two's work.</p>

<p><Chas><br /><br /></p>

I use a Drobo 5 with five 3TB Western Digital Red drives as my main storage container and the first level of back up in an

OWC RAID 5 box with four 3TB WD Red drives.

 

For optical discs I use M-Disc DVD and Blu-Ray media. Better than standard optical disc media. Http://www.mdisc.com

<p>I do keep DVD copies of a lot of my images, but my primary backup for some time (since the images got too large for a single disc to do a day's work) has been HD.<br>

I have 1 6TB drive and two 1TB drives. One of the latter is for unedited originals, and the other two of each other. Plus older stuff on a 500GB drive. My main disc space is SSD, but mostly for programs and data in process. I have over 500GB of photographic images.</p>

<p>Drives are commodities, these days.</p>

<p>On the issue of DVD reliability, I have DVD backups going back to 2005, and the only ones that failed did so due to the idiot (that would be me) who created the oldest disks on his old XP machine and failed to finalize them so they could read on other computers. Even on those disks, the data was still intact when recovered later with IsoBuster software. I always kept the DVDs in a dark, climate-controlled closet, which may be one clue to longevity. I'm about to find out: We recently moved from Tennessee to Arizona, and all those old DVDs are currently sitting in a U-Haul pod in Prescott, temperatures in the 100 degree +/- range, until the purchase of our new home closes. If they'll survive that, they'll survive anything.</p>

<p>Having said all that, I only do DVD backups now on an annual basis. Daily backups are done on two eSATA external hard drives, and weekly on a Passport portable hard drive that travels with my laptop.</p>

<p>Also, my primary file is a second internal hard drive, since the main "C" drive is always more prone to failures and virus infection.</p>

<p>Oh, and the cloud? Fuggeddaboudit...</p>

Yes, I am rotating hard drives to back up my main computer offsite. However I also dump new work to DVD or blueray

right after a shoot. My primary backup is a hard drive, it's cheap fast and effective. However you can't beat DVD or

blueray for some failure scenarios. Ransomware, accidents such as syncing up between drives and backup tombs being

unreadable by your backup software. Oh and the magnet truck parking out front of your house... (Not serious)....

DVD/BlueRay has the advantage of being write once therefore it's harder to delete it accidentally, though longevity is an

issue. I use verbatim for my disks since they have a relatively good reputation. Though my DVD/BlueRay disks stay on-

sight and I rely on hard drives for the rest. It think DVD/BlueRay is a good augmentation to not just rely on hard drive

platters, but it's a combination approach of a few technologies that is the best choice.

 

I recently got a BlueRay USB 3.0 external drive (Samsung) and I love it. 25 or 50gb disks. Still slow, but a nice compact

way to backup a lot of data. Set it burning then go do something else.

 

Also ref hard drives. I had an old hard drive with years of spinning on it that I stopped using and put into storage. I

recently plugged it in and it wouldn't spin. Tried a few times and waited a few days and then it spun up. My theory is the

bearings get old and sticky. Had to loosen them up to get it working. No real point here other than hard drives also can fail

you if you stick them into long term storage.

<p>A 4GB drive acts a my main storage device. Every night that drive is cloned (updated) to another 4GB drive. Both of these live inside my Mac Pro. Every so often I plug in my Drobo and another bare drive into a BlacX device and use Carbon Copy cloner to update those drives. Eventually I should take one of those drives to the office.<br>

The secondary 4GB drive is this slower/inexpensive <a href="http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/835055-REG/Hitachi_0S03359_4TB_Internal_Hard_Drive.html">Hitachi drive</a>. For my main 4GB I went with a 4GB WD Black with a 5-year warranty<br>

I recently completed uploading about 500GB of photos and videos to Amazon's "Glacier." This is cold storage meant for items that are infrequently accessed. If you are a Mac user look at Arq as the AWS interface. At a penny a GB a month this is my ultimate failsafe backup. Having everything there is real peace of mind.<br>

A few years ago I was backing up everything to DVDs but stopped. Even my old DVDs are perfectly readable.</p>

<p>I use both hard drives and DVDs. My Windows 7 system has two 2TB internal drives, C: and D:. I set up a batch file that runs robocopy (command line, comes with Windows). I've got it set up to copy various folders. If anything's been deleted at source it get's deleted at destination. Basically mirroring.</p>

<p>When the drives start getting too full, I start culling and/or moving to double DVD backup.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Is there anyone here backing up their Hard Drive with other Hard Drive.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Me. I too never use DVD, too small, way too slow IMHO. Can't remember the last time I burned one.<br /> Multiple drives in circulation/rotation plus <em>some</em> cloud backup via CrashPlan.</p>

I too use hard drives. As principal storage and back up.<br>A couple of NASs and a number of external HDs to back up the NAS HDs.<br><br>DVDs are indeed too slow, too expensive and do not last very long. I have transferred (that is: am still in the process of transferring) the store of DVDs to HDs, and there are several DVDs that have read errors (losing a single or a couple of files) or can't be read completely. Not a big problem, since i have another archive, containing the original images on their original film. But just a reminder that DVDs (and CDs) are not archival media.<br>HDs aren't either. But it is a lot easier, faster and cheaper to creat an overly redundant back up on HDs.

<p>All my pictures are placed on Western Digital Passport 2TB drives where I do my work on them. These drives are nice because they pull the power from the USB port and I plug them into any computer that I have and can access my working picture libraries.<br>

Once finalized I copy the pictures to Western Digital MyBook drive (6-8TB) and I then create a backup and archive copy (stored off site) of the MyBook Drive. At the end, I will have four copies of each picture spread out over 4 drives:<br>

1. Passport drive original copy<br>

2. Primary Storage MyBook Drive<br>

3. MyBook Drive Backup<br>

4. MyBook Drive Archive<br>

I am on a mac. For backup and archiving, I use Carbon Copy Cloner. Use to use SuperDuper, but they were not keeping up with development.<br>

I have over 300,000 images managed.<br>

I have also used a RAID 5 system, but it is important to remember that RAID systems are NOT backups, just more stable single copies of your pictures. </p>

<p>Welcome to the conundrum of Digital Is Better Than Analog Because You Can Do Lossless Copies And Yet At The End Of The Day The Medium Used Is Physical And It Isn't Durable As Old Analog Was.</p>

<p>The bottom line is that you can't trust ONE backup medium. With the state of technology these days, I'd keep everything in one of the modern multiple terabyte NAS things, and a copy of that in a different household, refreshed periodically over the network. This last bit may be tricky to set up, but after that it will be flawless. I wouldn't throw away any DVDs either, but I wouldn't count on all of them lasting more than 10 years.</p>

<p>Since someone had to make the "analog vs. digital" "point", </p>

<blockquote>

<p>Welcome to the conundrum of Digital Is Better Than Analog Because You Can Do Lossless Copies And Yet At The End Of The Day The Medium Used Is Physical And It Isn't Durable As Old Analog Was.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>it's worthwhile to note<br>

1) look at http://www.wilhelm-research.com for some data on those "archival" film images.<br /> 2) here's another comment on "Old Analog" durability:</p><div></div>

<blockquote>

<p>Welcome to the conundrum of Digital Is Better Than Analog Because You Can Do Lossless Copies And Yet At The End Of The Day The Medium Used Is Physical And It Isn't Durable As Old Analog Was.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>That statement <em>could</em> have some truth depending on what media the digital data was stored on but it's just ridiculous when the data is stored on multiple media and hopefully in differing locations. You've got ONE piece of film which as <a href="/photodb/user?user_id=1841065">JDM von Weinberg</a> illustrates, isn't very stable versus 1's and zero's which are either perfect or useless but one can build as many prefect copies of the numbers that make them feel they have protected the image. </p>

<blockquote>

<p>The bottom line is that you can't trust ONE backup medium.<br /></p>

</blockquote>

<p>Agreed, but you had one film original which is pretty fragile. I'll take a digital version over that any day of the week. Only a fool or someone who's got no education in digital/computers would only have one copy of a file they hope to keep long term. </p>

I'd more or less expect Andrew to nitpick, but not JDM. Well, if any of you read my comment as having anything to do with

'analog vs digital', what can I say but whoooooooosh?

 

The *media* used to store digital data are 'analog'. The lossless copies can be made not because the medium can be

directly duplicated (like film) but because the data can be read and written to a new medium. This has created the folk

belief that the medium is somehow digital, but it isn't. It's prone to deterioration, and user-writable media have so far

proven very unreliable. For every person claiming they have never had a CDR fail on them, there are a dozen who have

failing DVDs only 10 years old. It's because they didn't know how to store them? No, it's poor luck. Those same people

often have 40 year old slides in their attic of which a majority are just fine. By the way, good luck retrieving anything digital

from that tape you saved in the 1970s.

 

But as I'm sure everyone here has their stuff in multiple RAID systems in different bank vaults all across the solar system,

this concern is moot. Just how many duplicates did you used to make of your slides, while we're at it?

<p>Reading through these comments, I didn't see anything about protecting HD backups from surge, fire, flood, earthquake, explosion, etc. Ask yourself if you can afford to lose everything if any of these rare events occur. There needs to be a way of keeping backups far away from your computer. This is the primary advantage of the cloud, and if you don't use the cloud, you need to provide this protection another way.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Reading through these comments, I didn't see anything about protecting HD backups from surge, fire, flood, earthquake, explosion, etc.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I do believe I mentioned CrashPlan. Further, I have a fire proof safe that contains duplicate drives of the data I feel is important enough to go in there. </p>

<blockquote>

<p>I'd more or less expect Andrew to nitpick, but not JDM.</p>

</blockquote>

<p><em>Nitpick</em> is your term for people who don't agree with you? </p>

<blockquote>

<p>The *media* used to store digital data are 'analog'.<br /></p>

</blockquote>

<p>I kind of deserves a big '<em>Dudh</em>' and the reason those of us who understand these issues have multiple backup's. And in the grand scheme of things, your images and mine being lost isn't going to be a major setback for humanity. Maybe we should put or efforts into not killing each other or the planet at the same level of importance as backing up '<em>pictures</em>'. </p>

<blockquote>

<p>Those same people often have 40 year old slides in their attic of which a majority are just fine.<br /></p>

</blockquote>

<p>You make that statement of fact based on what data? It's a ridiculous assumption and only a basis in fact for those attic's you've been to and examined each slide. Did you? Yes, I'm nitpicking a statement you'd like us to take at face value that under even the smallest scrutiny appears to be made up (which it is). </p>

<blockquote>

<p>But as I'm sure everyone here has their stuff in multiple RAID systems in different bank vaults all across the solar system, this concern is moot.<br /></p>

</blockquote>

<p>I will only speak for myself, the answer is yes, it's moot. </p>

<p>Nothing special about using multiple media at all- just the "multiple" bit. There's nothing about one HD to mean that its failure increases the risk of another failing, or a DVD failing, or indeed your preferred "cloud" service disappearing. Having multiple backups clearly makes sense but shouldn't be used as an argument in favour of one medium or indeed mixed media. Just two backups on different sites, ideally.</p>

<blockquote>

<p> Having multiple backups clearly makes sense but shouldn't be used as an argument in favour of one medium or indeed mixed media. Just two backups on different sites, ideally.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>+1, well stated. S*&t happens, just have a backup plan. </p>

Even before you come up with a plan to back up your files, get a portable hard drive...today, and copy all

your photos to that and you have one one good back up. Something like a Western Digital passport is

reasonably priced.

While I have 4 digital copies of my pictures and I occasionally start up each of the drives, another problem arises about

legacy of the pictures. Few if any people will go back and look at those drives. Without someone maintaining and

migrating the files to the next generation system, all your images will pass into oblivion. One of the biggest reasons I take

pictures of family/friends is so that future generations can see who we were in the 2000's.

 

This thought process has started me thinking of approaches to print archiving of the most important pictures. I wonder

how other people think about this problem. Individual prints, books, something else?