How Do You Back Up 500 Giga Bytes?

How would you back up 500 Gigs of Raws Jpgs and movies, cost

effective?

This has been discussed at length in prior posts.

 

I'd throw two 250 GB 5400 RPM drives in individual USB 2.0 drive enclosures. They'll run at about half-speed, but if your PC power supply spikes, it won't kill them. You could use internal drives, but that's really putting all your eggs in one basket.

 

Alternately, you could do the same thing with 400 GB drives, and keep the second located offsite. Or your could build a cheap Athlon file server and use a couple of 100 MBit cards to sync the two systems. Certainly more robust solutions exist, but cost increases in proportion.

 

If your system isn't already behind a UPS, buy one.

 

DI

Or you buy a LaCie 500GB Big Drive for a little over $500. It's also USB 2.0 and Firewire

800/400.

Any external hard drive solution is a great safe way to back data up. I presume this won't be the only copy of your data. External drives are great because they can be disconnected and left off, so whatever might kill your PC is less likely to kill them. They're also a lot more archival and cheaper for the storage they provide than removable media.

A hard drive is not a backup, it will fail when you need it most. I lost some important DV footage when not one but two hard drives died the same day. One was through Windows XP/Firewire corruption problems and one was physical damage. (A newish 200G Western Digital that head crashed for no apparent reason, apparently not unheard of with that model - but unless you're very lucky you don't know that until after you lose your data, because nobody had any problems when you read all the reviews.)

 

Optical media might be cheaper but is probably a lot slower than tape. If you buy the expensive DVD-Rs that are claimed to be 30-year archival quality it probably isn't even cheap and you don't know how true that claim is.

 

The only advantage of hard drives is that they are faster and cheaper than almost anything else. You have to be unlucky to get a bad one but odds are you will one day and if you don't have more than two copies that could be all it takes.

 

The question is how important is your data? Is it just inconvenient to have to recreate that 500G or is it impossible? "Safe" is two complete, verified tape backup sets stored in different physical locations. Safer is more sets, verified on different tape drives. It's cost effective if your data is worth significantly more than the tapes.

We use LTO backup (ultrium drives). A standard tape holds 200GB but with compression can go to 400GB. The most important thing is your backup software. A lot of folks use the standard windows backup program but have you ever tried to restore from it! The downside is the price, app. £3000 for the drive plus £40+ per tape so I think the cost effective part of your question won't apply to LTO. So, the most cost effective route is multiple disks, the problem being how do you backup your backup.

buy a 1 terabyte RAID array.

500G is not a small volume of data and it will keep growing fast. I suggest you start classifying your images into 3 categories and apply different backup strategy to each of them.

 

1. images that you currently working on or need access frequently

 

2. images that you like but do need to access in the near future

 

3. images you want to keep just in case

 

For 1, use RAID disk in your PC to store the data and backup using remote hard disk on a regular basis and store off-site. RAID disk is less expensive for smaller amount of data (say less than 80G as a 80G hard disk costs only about $60) but save your hard works on Photoshop in case one of the disk fails.

 

For 2, use remote hard disk to store your data and access them when needed. Keep an extra copy on another remote hard disk as backup. Hard disk has many mechanical parts and is easy to fail if it works all the time as installed inside a PC. Remote hard disk only works when you need it so the life of the hard disk is usually longer.

 

For 3, use DVD to backup once and store the disc away. DVD is a cheap media for backup and in general has a long shelf life. The problem of using DVD in regular backup is that you need to attend to the backup and change the disc. i.e. you need to change over 100 times to backup a full 500G data on DVD. It is OK if you only need to do it once and not on regular basis.

 

Off-site and verified tape backup is the cheapest and most reliable way for backup. However, you need a big volume (over 1,000G) to justify a good tape unit (no point ot buy a cheap one).

I would look at a dedicated storage solution from a major vendor. Something along the lines of a deskside Dell PowerVault 745N which gives you room to grow. (4TB max)

Anybody who thinks tape is a reliable storage medium must not of ever had to restore a directory server from them. It makes the suits feel good that I carry the can of Ultriums off site each weekend, but I know it's a disaster if I ever have to do a big restore from them if the originating back-up server is the one that takes a dive. That's why I run external drives nightly for incremental backups. Plus, movies and JPGs are already compressed.

 

My vote is for the LaCie. Outstanding external drive, built like a tank and strongly recommended. If you need redundancy, buy two of them - duh.

Rob's suggestion is not a bad one if you're really serious about backing up large quantities of data.

 

Adam, hard drives are more reliable and long lasting than CDs and DVDs, you can leave an external hard drive off and put away except when you need it. I'll guarantee you they'll hold up longer than optical media most of the time. You're talking about internal drives when windows has an error, and a physial failure with the second drive. This is precisely why you don't keep any fewer than 2 copies of the same data and why you don't keep them on the same machine. If your powersupply goes nuts it could kill every drive in your box and while the data could probably be recovered at great expense, that lowly $200 (or less these days) external hard drive has all you need. Just plug it in to another computer and go.

 

I use 3 levels of storage, internal drives on my computer, my 120 gig firewire drive and CDs or DVDs which can be burned and kept elsewhere.

Scott's absolutely right. For years, we archived everything on AIT. Our hunch a

couple of years ago was that maybe it wasn't the most reliable solution, so we switched to

drives (and saved money). Only now are we discovering that our hunch was correct.

Backing is starting to separate on some tapes, others have been mysteriously

demagnetized, and others just don't want to work anymore. Linear storage is dead, as far

as I'm concerned. And if we need redundancy, as Scott said, just buy another drive. You'll

save time AND money.

 

A 1TB RAID array? Did you read the words "cost effective" in Babak's post? It doesn't need

to be as difficult as some of you are making it out to be.

buy 3215236236 cds, and a lotta coffee....

See... Yet another reason to shoot film. Sheesh.

try RAID

Scott, have you managed to figure out what drives Lacie uses in their external enclosures? I haven't felt brave enough to open mine up yet, but I bet its a WD or something.

<I>See... Yet another reason to shoot film. Sheesh.</i><P>Yet another reason for photo.net to install an /ignore switch for trolls like Brad. Another digital hater with no uploads because his work sucks so bad. Gee, must not have our quota this week. Go shoot your 35mm film Brad, and when you have pictures to show for it, please come back and thread bomb like you rudely do now.<P>One advantage of the external drive is that, as mentioned above, a crappy power supply or power surge in your computer won't blow them like internal drives.

Scott, you really are an idiot. If you would have bothered to click on my name, and then on

some of the threads that followed, you would have found that I've probably posted more

than 1.5 K pix. As far as being a digital hater, that's hilarious. Everything posted for the

last two+ years to pn was with a sony digicam.

For the record both disks that died were external firewire - one WD 120G (that is still working today) that just got corrupted while reading from it, and the WD 200G that crashed. Making a drive external doesn't make it any safer. Nor does using a Mac - recent Oxford chip (LaCie and many others) & software incompatibilities saw a lot of people lose their entire "safe" storage. Now it's fixed with firmware updates but it could easily happen again.

 

The LaCie unit I owned was a 400G "Big Disk". It used the same WD 200G drives as the one that died, and uses an Oxford RAID0-like firewire controller. I don't like them a lot, partly because my one question to their tech support people was ignored and partly because they pack hot 7200rpm drives into a very small enclosure with no fan. The larger models do use a fan but I haven't opened one of those up to see what drives they use.

 

Today I have everything on a RAID5 Linux machine that roars away in the garage - 3Ware controller & enclosure. If one disk fails I get the chance to replace it before any data is lost but I still want a backup - what if I run out of space and need to add drives? RAID will grow, but the OS might not allow seamlessly growing the filesystem to the new partition. I'm considering isolating the really important stuff (as opposed to the stuff that could be recreated/resourced) and storing on other drives but also trying out the various hacks allowing data storage on DV tape through a camcorder or deck. At the price of DV tape I can afford multiple copies. But I would still like an Ultrium unit.

hehehe

The current Big Disks are striped 7200 RPM 8mb cache Western Digitals. I've only ever

seen one fail.

i know this is highly subjective, but seagate is a safer bet, imo and experience, and maxtor is notorious anyway.

<I>Scott, have you managed to figure out what drives Lacie uses in their external

enclosures? I haven't felt brave enough to open mine up yet, but I bet its a WD or

something.</I><P>

 

Two Maxtor 250 GB drives at RAID 0 in a single case. Too bad they're not Hitachi 7K250s,

or even better, 7K400s...

Funny - we've taken apart a few of them and they were all the same - WD.

Another reason to shoot film -- love it!