External HD recommendations

[bill_keane2]

I've been storing all my digital files on a 250gig Western Digital HD. I

can't see myself regularly burning to CD's so I was thinking of getting

another large capacity external, in case the Western crashed.

 

Any thoughts as to most reliable brand/type? I saw a Seagate 300gig for

$99... What about the small travel externals, are they good as extra backups?

 

Thanks for your insights.

[bobatkins]

I would not just depend on a hard drive for backup. You really should make backups on DVDs as well, at least for important stuff. I suppose duplicating on a 2nd hard drive is OK, but if it's online and your drive controller goes crazy or you get a voltage spike from a local lightning strike, you could lose both of them.

 

You can get 8.5GB on a dual layer DVD. 4.7GB on a single layer. I agree that backing up on CDs would be pretty tedious

[saltcod]

Get firewire if you can, I recommend IOGear and don't recommend Lacie.

[digitmstr]

Western Digital is selling the My Book 500Gb drive which has USB 2.0 as well as Firewire connections. I saw it on sale for $99.00 which is a good deal. DO a search on Google...

[mikep]

I have 2 250 LaCies. They have Western Digital HDs in them and take up a tiny footprint. $99 at Amazon.

[godfrey]

I have been doing all backups to multiple external hard drives for a couple of years now.

It's an excellent way to go. I also backup individual projects to a couple of DVDs but

they're for archive purposes ... I've rarely had occasion to look at them once they're in the

archive. <br>

<br>

The likelihood that two hard drives will fail simultaneously is vanishingly small. If you write

backups to two mirrored hard drives, you have your data on THREE drives at the same time

... it is almost inconceivable that all three could fail at the same time. <br>

<br>

- get two matched external drives<br>

- get backup or synchronization software to do the job for you<br>

- backup every day <br>

<br>

For a long time I bought bare drives and matching power enclosures, but lately the prices

on complete external drive units, enclosure and drive, has dropped to the point where I

buy complete units. The latest that I've gotten are a pair of Seagate 500G drives in fan-

cooled, USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 compatible enclosures. They cost about $199 apiece on

sale at Fry's Electronics within the past few weeks. I connect with Firewire ... it's faster for

this kind of data transfer than USB 2.0 but if your system only had USB 2.0, use that. <br>

<br>

Compact portable drives aren't as useful for backup ... they're not as fast, not as large in

capacity, and tend to overheat if used heavily for too long a time. They're better for on-

the-road backup storage if you're carrying a laptop. <br>

<br>

It's very important that you use software to do the backups ... What you want is two drives

that are exact mirrors of one another after a backup operation, and you want it to work

automatically, consistently, every time. <br>

<br>

For my photo libraries, the individual files are too large and touched too often for

incremental backup solutions to be useful ... I'd fill the drives with incremental updates

very quickly. So I use synchronizer software that <br>

a) makes sure the all files touched in the source directory since the last backup are

refreshed on the target, <br>

b) keeps track of deletions in the source on the target so I can determine whether I need

to save them or fully delete them, and<br>

c) keeps an an explicit log in text form of backup operations so I can review what has been

done after a backup finishes. <br>

<br>

On Mac OS X, I use an application named "ChronoSync" by Ecom Technologies. It's cheap,

it does the above job efficiently. Every day, after finishing a round of editing and other

work, I turn on the external drives and run ChronoSync with the set of synchronizer

documents I created. It goes through the couple hundred Gbytes of my photo libraries,

updates all changed files to both drives, and sends me an email telling me what it did.

Can't ask for more ... but it can do more if I want. <br>

<br>

Godfrey<br>

[bobatkins]

"it is almost inconceivable that all three could fail at the same time"

 

How big is "almost" if they are all plugged into the same system? What happens if you pick up a nasty virus?

 

There's a reason that data centers back up data off line on tape drives (and similar devices) rather than just stuffing in more and more redundant hard drives.

[J.W. Wall]

FWIW, I had a 200GB LaCie external fail, taking my data with it. Fortunately, it was backed up to DVDs (lots of them!). I use Western Digital HDs now, recommended by a couple of trustworthy computer engineer relatives. I also back up to DVDs, two sets -- one here, one offsite.

[ace_fury]

<I>What happens if you pick up a nasty virus? </I><P>Buy a Macintosh.

[beauh44]

I suspect that one could just as easily inadvertenly backup a virus to tape or external DVD as to an external hard disk. And I've *definitely* seen tapes - and tape drives - fail time and time again. (I've been burned badly by tape backup!) DVDs and CDs can fail as well. In short *everything* can fail, unfortunately.

 

I use a slight variation of Godfrey's method, in part because my camera makes such huge files it's very time-consuming to make DVDs of everything. But I *do* make DVDs of anything I deem pretty darn important, in addition to having my data on multiple drives, some of which I store away from my home and do not remain connected to my main, Photoshop PC.

 

It's just that I have "tons" (can ya' weigh data? :) of "snapshot" kinds of photos of silly stuff that I just can't justify sitting around for hours, burning it all to DVDs - especially when I can just initiate a copy to an external drive and walk away without babysitting the DVD burning process.

 

IMHO tape backups made sense when the cost-per-megabyte of disk storage was so high - thinking back to the mid 80's through mid-90's when one gigabyte was a *LOT* of data and the drives cost a small fortune.

 

But today, external hard disk storage has become so inexpensive that its become my primary source of backup. And yes, they can fail too but hopefully if you have several you'll be fine.

 

If I've shot something like a wedding I'll definitely burn that to at least 2 DVDs as well as an external drive or two. If it's just a few more cat shots - nahhh. Those just go to external hard disks. Good luck!

[godfrey]

Bob:

<br>

<i>...'How big is almost...?'...</i>

<br><br>

They're only plugged in and running when the backup is proceeding, and then one at a

time unless I get lazy. I usually am lazy and let the back up run to both at the same time,

but power doesn't fluctuate here very much and they're on an UPS anyway.

<br><br>

<i>...'pick up a nasty virus'...</i>

<br><br>

I run Mac OS X.

<br>

Aside from the usual precautions of firewalling my network and configuring the machine

properly with an administrator and a user account, working from the user account, I

haven't yet seen a single virus touch my system since March 24, 2001. But thanks for

asking. ;-)

<br><br>

Godfrey

[godfrey]

The huge advantage to using hard drives is that it is so much easier to audit and check a

few large volumes on a regular basis than it is to audit and check 100x as many small

volumes. I have *hundreds* of CDs and DVDs ... a verification check would take two

months at least. I can set up one of the hard drives and do a deep file-by-file verify

overnight, and thats about the same amount of data volume.

 

Replication and periodic maintenance are essential. CD and DVD volumes are too small

and too slow for today's photographic work, unless you only do a few pictures a week.

 

Godfrey

[bobatkins]

Suit yourself. I'd still suggest doing long ternm backups on DVDs. Even if your system gets hosed, the DVDs will still be OK. Short term backups on multiple HDs are probably OK. In fact that's what I do with my primary hard drive. It's backed up (cloned) onto other hard drives at regular intervals. One backup is always online. A second one is not connected to the system except for when it's updated.

 

You may never have had a virus attack on a Mac running OS X, but for some people that might make it an even more attractive target. http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/weblog/2006/07/macinenterprise_mac_os_x_virus.html

[godfrey]

Sure, Bob. You planning to write some Mac OS X viruses just so that it can be as

compromised and screwed up as the other OS? The practical fact is that the threat of virus

invasion is very small to nonexistent for users who practice normal, sensible security

measures. I practice sensible security measures with both my network configuration and

my client system configuration to ensure that they and my data storage remain free of

viruses.

 

To back up what I have on just one drive would require almost 100 standard DVD+R

media. And DVD media will fail in time, so you have to both make at least two copies and

periodically refresh the archive. Unless you want to come over and be a disk monkey for a

few months, the hard disk drives are a much more practical long term storage solution,

particularly if you maintain them properly and migrate the data as media and protocols

change.

 

Some risk of loss exists for any kind of storage system, including for archival prints stored

in a vault. That's the nature of doing photography.

 

Godfrey

[kuryan_thomas]

I used to back up my 200GB of images to DVDs. OK, I admit - I tried it once. Then I bought

external hard disks, backing up to one and keeping two offsite in different locations,

rotating them once a week.

 

Anyone who can maintain 3 rotating backups of a 200GB archive on DVDs has a lot more

intestinal fortitude than I do. I freely admit I have very little of said IF.

 

As to brands - unlike almost everyone whose opinions I read on the "interwebs", I have had

excellent results from LaCie Extreme disks. My 3 rotating backups are all LaCie 500GB

Extremes. Given the generally low ratings LaCie gets at most user-review sites, I may just

be lucky.

 

I also have a Seagate external USB-powered disk that I carry with me on photo trips for

backups from my laptop. It's worked very well and I can recommend it. A friend has

Western Digital and has also had no problems.

[amorteguy]

"Rotating back ups on DVDs" Huh? I don't rotate them, I just burn them. I have a spreadsheet of DVD numbers and folders with short descriptions of contents so I can quickly find any image I need.

 

I shoot digi and also scan my film. All of this is kept on the internal HDD first, then eventually moved to an external HDD (I have a 250 and a 500 LaCie.) I keep all the files in folders that are limited to "DVD size" so it makes burning DVDs easier. One set of DVDs is kept here and a deplicate set off-site.

[KenPapai]

Originally I began dupe backups to CD-ROMS (Argh! 10 times worse than writing to DVDs) and gave up. The I got smart and switched to rotating hard drives. I don't use any automatic backup software. 5 times a week I copy all my updated documents and image files to a an external hard disk, rotate that one out of the line-up then go to the 2nd external drive. Currently I use three 250+ GB drives. The odds of them all failing with even months of each other are as close to zero as you can get (e.g. NEVER could happen). Only a catastrophe would wipe everything out (fire, 5,000 year flood, 8.0 quake, theft, or meteor).

 

The threat of a virus is as close to zero as well.

 

If I were OCD I'd offsite one of my external drives in a bank safety deposit box, or even at a neighbor's house. That way I'd be protect due to theft or fire. Practicality has its limits. Accessibility is paramount (DVDs are never accessible, way too manual).

[adam_barr2]

You might also want to check out Amazon S3. In additional to local backups I use it for offsite. Pretty cheap, and won't degrade like offsite DVDs will.

[howard_owen]

If speed is a concern, look for an eSATA external enclosure and add your own SATA drive. If your computer is not fairly new, it will lack eSATA support and will have to provide it via an expansion card, preferably PCIe.

 

Just be aware that not all eSATA enclosures are created equal. There *is* a spec and there *is* an official eSATA logo which is not to be used unless the hardware conforms to the spec. The spec provides for signal integrity, so it's not to be ignored.

[kuryan_thomas]

<i>"Rotating back ups on DVDs" Huh? I don't rotate them, I just burn them.</i>

<p>

What if your house burns down? Do you have an offsite backup? That's what I mean by

rotating backups. I store one in my apartment, one in my office close to my apartment, and

one in my weekend house about 200 miles away. Each one moves one step over each week.

Unless the entire east coast of the US is obliterated, I will not lose more than 2 weeks of

work.

<p>

Doing that with DVDs is close to impossible. Or maybe just plain impossible.