Storage strategies

<p>I just got a nice new computer and it is a pleasure to use. For cost considerations I went with ( 1 ) TB HD, figuring I would be adding storage after my wallet filled back up. It seems many folks are using external HD's to store photos, maybe two with one as a mirror. We are generating enormous amounts of data these days and I blew through a 500G internal HD in about a quarter of the time I thought I would based on my picture accumulation. Most of us are going to have internal or external HD's stacked up like photo albums, so I am trying to think of a good strategy. Burn to DVD and also store on HD? It gets pretty expensive if my strategy is to have duplicate HD's.</p>

<p>I do exactly that. I have more than one external drive, and I back up between them, BUT I also back up to DVD. Even if you sync data to multiple drives, there are still things that put files at risk (accidental deletions, overwriting a file with the same name to point out a few. You cannot count on DVDs (they do fail - but not as often as some would have you believe), but IMO they should be part of any data retention strategy.</p>

<p>My solution is to keep my photo files on a second internal HD, lessening the chance that the files will be affected if the main "C" drive goes belly up or gets trashed by a virus. I also back up on two external eSATA HDs, one specific to my computer, the other which serves as a network backup for both my machine and my wife's. I also back up the photo files on a portable HD that goes with the laptop whenever we're on the road. (Who, me, paranoid?)</p>

<p>DVD backup? Well, yeah, but only once a year, because it takes a lot of time and a rather large stack of DVDs to do the job...</p>

<p>Sort of what William described - we have a separate interntal 2TB drive just for pictures, music and document libraries. The operating system and program directories are on the internal C drive. There is one external drive sitting on the tower that is a mirror for the data / photo files, plugged in and running constantly in case the internal data drive dies. And, we have three external HD's that are used to do an incremental back-up, with one cycled through each week. Those are moved off-site, stored at my office, the day after a backup is done. </p>

<p>We only use DVD's for occasionally exchanging photos with others - and now most of that is done through Google+/Picasa so I don't think we've burned a DVD yet this year.</p>

<p>We use hard drives. Specifically, we use an external hard drive tower from Mac Gurus although there are several other brands available. For our personal data, we use one hard drive to import the images to and another that has a managed Aperture Library and a back up of each drive; so four drives in total. We use the same strategy professionally, but with four drive per year. And we are in the process of merging the data from multiple smaller drives from 2008 and 2009 to larger, single drives. And I foresee this strategy continuing in the future: updating smaller older drives to larger newer drives. If nothing else, it keeps drives "newer". The last year we used optical media as a back up strategy was 2009. It is simply to slow and ins't any more reliable than hard drives. Which is to say that <em>any</em> media can fail over time and as such needs to be periodically updated. Try copying a years worth of optical media to either a hard drive or God forbid, different optical media... hope you have weeks to spare. Which is the biggest reason we quit using it.</p>

My main internal hard drive is partioned with only 40gb allocated to the operating system and applications (C Drive). MyDocuments, MyPictures, all cache folders, etc., are kept elswhere. I have an automated backup system that images C Drive once a week. No data is kept there. A second internal drive holds the data, and I back it up daily to an external hard drive. Once a week I swap the external drive with a second one I store at my daughter's house, then repeat the process. If I'm working on a major project, I replace the off-site drive more often than that -- sometimes daily.

<p>@Will - I think that last part in your post is quite important. If we are working on a project the backup cycles are more frequent, even daily as you point out. I don't want to lose two or three days of work unnecessarily.</p>

Right, David. When I was nearing completion of a recent book (250 16-bit TIFF files to the publisher) I sometimes swapped the off-site drive twice a day. My daughter lives just around the corner from me. Call me anal, paranoid or any number of other names you could come up with, but I will never lose more than a few hours worth of important data. By the way, I'm also a writer, so that goes equally for my text files -- perhaps even more so.

<p>Be aware of the speed of your hard drives. Most internal hard drives rotate at 7200 rpm, but a lot of external drives (and laptop drives) rotate at 5400 rpm, which is much slower and makes accessing your photos noticably slower. Try to keep your Operating System, your software, and your data files on fast drives. Slow external drives should be for backup only.</p>

<p>I've been working inside my computer this week and here is my storage plan:</p>

<p>C: Windows 7 64-bit Professional on a 120GB Solid State Drive (very, very, fast)<br>

D: photos and Lightroom catalog on a 10,000 rpm 150GB Raptor magnetic drive (very fast)<br>

E: data on a 7200 rpm 750 GB magnetic drive (fast)<br>

F: data backup on an identical 7200 rpm 750 GB magnetic drive (fast)<br>

External: data backup on a 5400 rpm 1TB portable drive (slow)</p>

<p>The Raptor will be used for fast-access data and I will write batch files to back things up. The Raptor will be backed up to E: and added to my normal data, and E: will be backed up to F:, so that both are identical copies. That gives me three copies of photos and two copies of everything else on hard drives inside my computer. F: will be backed up to the external drive which is stored in the fire-proof safe in my closet. I don't have any off-site backup except for 2GB of text files stored in the Cloud with Norton 360, so I need to think about that. And, of course, as my photo library grows it could outgrow the 150GB Raptor, but there's no danger of that right now.</p>

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<p>Normally by now someone would have asked about the potential to use cloud storage as a backup device, at least. I have yet to talk with anyone with 100's of gb's of photos who has gone this way, even on an "optional" basis. My experiments show that it would take days to do any major changes, such as coming back from a vacation or a race weekend with a couple of 16gb cards filled up, but I'm eagerly waiting for someone to show the way on this. I think with credible companies like Amazon or Google this makes a lot of sense, ultimately.</p>

<p>When backing up data, it is important to distinguish between computer disaster recovery and a real disaster recovery.</p>

<p>For computer disaster recovery, I use external HDs that are always connected to the computer as that can happen daily. Good recovery software will backup only those files that have changed so you can backup a lot more data that you would expect. It is also OK to over write really old data. I normally alternate between two drives so if something happens to one, the other has a fairly recent backup.</p>

<p>For real disasters, I write to a DVD and store that offline. A good fireproof box will protect the DVDs from fire and other natural disasters. If you are really paranoic, rent a safe deposit box. That should handle any hurricane, tornado, flood, etc. that can hit your area. I also free up HD space by deleting files copied to the DVD that I do not expect to be use again soon.</p>

<p>Danny</p>

 

I Store by the year on two to three external HD's. I have the current year on my internal HD for easy access. For example

I now have 2012 pictures on my internal HD and an external one at the same time, when 2012 is done I will copy the

internal HD to an external one and free up the computer for 2013. With these newer cameras one year worth of pictures

can add up to a lot of space. I have 04/05/06/07/08 on three HD's since all those years together do not account for much

09'/10'/and 2011 that is a diffent story everything is raw and small jpegs.

<p>Alex - what's your strategy for backing up those external HD's? It sounds as if you have a potential problem if one of them fails in some way.</p>

<p>Rule number 1 -- all drives fail<br>

Rule number 2 -- they fail at the least convenient time<br>

If you are on a Mac you should use Time Machine on an external drive.<br>

I would have at least 3 copies of anything you want to save: one to use, one as a spare and one to fail...<br>

Work locally, back-up remotely. Having an air-gapped backup is a good idea to prevent any malware corruption.<br>

With an air-gap, if a drive failure is caused by a systemic problem you could lose the two connected devices and preserve the third.</p>

<p>All good rules, John. I have been in IT for quite some time, and your rules #1 and #2 apply to all data storage products ever built. Always assume a component will fail - and have a plan when it does. Despite the fact that I pretty much follow the approach you lay out in your post, I was down to the last "golden copy" at one point two years ago because of hard drive failures, and an electric problem when I was restoring. I probably could have pieced it all back together and would have had most of the files without that last backup, but I was being very careful at the end, as you can imagine.</p>

<p>I also have a rule that my input devices (camera cards, files received over emails, etc.) do not get deleted/formatted unless there are two full copies of the data first. Just another part of the process.</p>

<p>I try to keep four copies of my RAW files and three copies of my Aperture libraries that have the instruction set for processing those files.<br>

1. One set is stored on Western Digital Passport Drives. This is the first drive my pictures are placed.<br>

2. A second set is my permanent working drive (My Book Western Digital Drives)<br>

3. A third set is a backup of my working drive (another Western Digital Drive)<br>

4. A fourth set as an archive which is stored off site (another Western Digital Drive)<br>

Probably 4-6 times, I have had to recovery disks from their backups over a period of a decade or so and once I had to go to the archive disk.<br>

Do the math. DVD's as a storage device is not a very good solution unless you do not generate very many pictures a year or you only store small versions of them. And all of your pictures are highly fragmented over lots of disks.</p>

<p><strong>"Burn to DVD and also store on HD?"</strong><br>

@Tim, yes. Burn as you make data. Most of the time I'm able to burn a dvd before over-writing my cards. I had a nasty virus and all my internal and external hdd's were infected. We thought we cleaned it, would rebuild it with new hdd's, install new duped hdd's with duplicated data, and, well, the short version is I after three re-builds and many lost TB's and expensive new and infected hdd's, the only place I had my data was on back-up dvd's. The only thing that saved me was dvd's. Yes, they may take a bit of time ( I hit "burn" when Ii know I am leaving for while or going to bed) but they have been the only thing that has allowed me to sleep alright. At $0.25 a dvd, I don't even wait until I have enough data to fill one, I just burn it.</p>

<p><strong>"Normally by now someone would have asked about the potential to use cloud storage as a backup device, at least."</strong><br>

@David, I'm open to hear experiences as well. I use google docs and know of others that use S3 and have sent amazon their hdd's. But with CS6 now in the cloud and our files potentially being stored there, it would be fantastic to work in the cloud as well, from anywhere and on anything. </p>

<p>@Eric - perhaps one of us should throw that question out there and see who salutes?</p>