How many backups?

[eric_brody]

<p>I currently have about 860GB of images on the photo storage 1TB drive in my Mac Pro Tower. I have it backed up to another 1TB drive in the tower and to three 1TB bare drives which I use with a Voyager "toaster" and store in cases on my bookshelf, and yet another one I keep off site. Thus, FIVE backups of my photo data. This seems like overkill even to compulsive me. I have a separate set of backups of the Mac HD with OSX, applications, and non-photo data. I use Super Duper to clone the drives and have been happy with it.<br>

Recently I have been making around 200-250GB of images per year with my D700. I expect things to get only bigger with the development of newer cameras, and my spending more time making photos, though I am quite happy with the quality I am getting with my current camera and set of lenses. I do not earn my living with in photography but the images are important to me and to my family.<br>

Since the main storage drive is almost full, I am trying to plan for the next steps and have two questions.<br>

1. How many backups do people keep? I assume no less than two or three.<br>

2. Are people using 2TB or even 3TB drives now? I realize it's the old question of how many eggs in one basket but with numerous backups, and off site as well, there's some safety.<br>

Opinions are welcome.<br>

Thanks.</p>

 

[William Kahn]

<p>Gee, and I thought I was paranoid! ;-) At present, my photo files are backed up on a local, external eSATA drive, and on a similar drive on another computer that acts as the network storeage server for our other three computers. The network drive goes to a safe deposit box when we hit the road. I also back up the files to a My Passport external drive that goes with the laptop when we're on the road. Besides that, photo files get backed up annually to one set of DVDs, and RAW files to another set of DVDs as they happen.</p>

<p>So far, I haven't felt the need to go bigger than 750GB on drive size...</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p>How man dvd back-ups are you doing? One EMP bomb could ruin your whole day. If you're not going to do optical disk, I'd at least get a copy to the clouds.</p>

<p><em>1. How many backups do people keep? I assume no less than two or three.</em></p>

<p>Two dvd, and two hard drive copies. One dvd and one hdd copy goes off-site.</p>

<p>2. Are people using 2TB or even 3TB drives now?</p>

<p>I use WD Green 2TB for Archiving. They are slower than the black version but they just sit un-used, I don't care about the performance loss. Every couple years I transfer the data onto new drives.</p>

<p>Your biggest issue is just keeping one type of back-up. You need to get onto dvd (too bad blu-ray isn't on mac) or go to the clouds like with Amazon s3.</p>

[robert lee]

<blockquote>

<p>How many backups do people keep?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Around 2 digital copies. More if you count the negatives. More if you count the prints of the really well done shots. </p>

<p>A lot more if it's really important data.</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p>Are people using 2TB or even 3TB drives now?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I'm not yet. I usually buy a bunch of new media at every doubling of capacity. My last major purchase was a group of 6 1.5TB drives that went into my current 6TB array. The next round will be at the 3TB/$100 price point, say 18 months or so.</p>

<p>It's worked out quite well over actually over the last decade or two. Generally, demand for data capacity has basically kept pace with media capacity to provide it.</p>

[marc_rochkind]

I agree with Garrison. It's not the number, it's the diversification that's important. You're most precious images should be in the cloud. I use Amazon S3.

[wclark5179]

<p>Just a thought...<br /> When I was film based I had only 1 negative of each photograph. I didn't worry too much about them being corrupted with fungus, fading or getting brittle from age. And what would happen if they were stolen or a flood/fire destroyed my studio?</p>

<p>It never happened. Thank goodness.</p>

<p>Why so many copies needed now? I do backups of my digital files, but like my film, haven't had any problems yet.</p>

<p>Maybe I'm due. Maybe not. Perhaps it has something to do with my workflow, how I treat the XT hard drives, etc. <br /> I don't worry about it. Make several copies or several hundred, stuff can happen that you could lose them all. But what are the chances of that happening?<br /> My advice, treat the equipment like its supposed to be, be careful and the rest should fall into place.</p>

[bgelfand]

 

<blockquote>

<p> One EMP bomb could ruin your whole day.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Since long range EMP bombs are thermonuclear devices, one would definitely ruin my day - and the least of my worries if a thermonuclear device detonated in my vicinity would be the loss of my photos. Let's get real about threats. A house fire or flood is much more likely.<br>

<br>

[Yes, Garrison, I know there are non-nuclear EMP bombs, but their effect is very focused and very short ranged. I doubt than any of us will be the target of one. The usual target of one is a Command and Control Center or other such high value military targets; the delivery vehicle is a Cruise Missile. ]<br>

<br>

Back to the original poster's question, I keep two on site backup copies and one off site in my safe deposit box. One on site is on a second hard drive in my computer, the other is on an external hard drive that is off (powered down) unless I am backing up. The offsite backup is on a flash drive.<br>

<br>

Of course, I have far fewer images than the OP. Most of my images are on film (safe from EMP bombs, but the fireball following the blast would probably get them <grin>).<br>

<br>

The OP has a very good question. How does one backup and archive what use to be considered a huge amount of data and do it economically? I have yet to find a good answer.</p>

<p> </p>

[robert lee]

<blockquote>

<p>You're most precious images should be in the cloud.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Cloud storage is great in principle, but I've never understood the practicality of it. The price/bit issues aside, how are you doing the uploads? Be it film or digital, I routinely end up with gigabytes of data. A routine session for me generates 16GB of new stills and video. That's a 35hr transfer at 1Mbps.</p>

<p>For offsite storage, consider renting room at a data archive that specializes in just that. $100/month gets you a file cabinet sized volume in an environmentally controlled, physically secured vault. Total storage capacity scales as bulk media capacity increases over time. Data transfer speed is potentially hundreds of TB per day (i.e., FedEx overnight :-)</p>

[eric_brody]

<p>I very much appreciate all the responses so far. Please keep them coming.<br>

As stated by others, my photos would be the least of any of our problems in a nuclear war, accident, or major natural disaster such as just tragically happened in Japan. I did CD/DVD backups years ago. I gave it up as my data increased.<br>

Hard disk storage appears to be the most cost and time effective way to keep backups absent nuclear war, hence my "single solution." Clearly the probability of disk failure for any single disk is significant. I have had a 1TB disk go south, but lost no data because of my backup system. Multiple disk failure becomes exponentially less probable depending on how many disks one uses, the reason for disk failure (fire in a non-smoker, non candle user's home is probably less likely than a disk just failing), and where they are. Fires do not usually occur simultaneously in different homes in the absence of a natural disaster or war.<br>

I am not sure what advantage the "cloud" has over my in-law's home, a few blocks away, for a non-professional. Since we currently get along (always a risk, I guess), my backups are pretty secure.<br>

Thanks.<br>

Thanks.</p>

[simon_crofts]

<p>One thing is to keepy RAW files on a separate disc from the TIFFs derived from them. It makes no sense to keep them on the same disc, if that disc goes tits up you lose two copies.</p>

<p>So I keep the following copies:</p>

<p>1. Original TIFFs disc<br>

2. TIFFs backup disc<br>

3. TIFFs second backup disc<br>

4. TIFFs off-site back up disc<br>

5. RAW disc<br>

6. RAW backup disc</p>

<p>Also files that I've made but haven't had time to put on the off-site back up get a temporary backup onto a separate small backup disc that goes with me whenever I leave home, and gets downloaded every time I visit the off-site backup.</p>

<p>I never have more than two discs connected to the mains at the same time. Some time ago a spike in current managed to fry my main disc and backup disc simultaneously, in the days when I only had one backup. Won't make that mistake again.</p>

<p>CF cards aren't wiped until the images have been backed up onto at least two separate discs.</p>

<p>Burning optical discs take too long. I take the risk of thermonuclear devices.</p>

[rnt]

<p>Hmmm... Backups. Well. I have my originals on a drive that is backed up daily to a local RAID array. I occasionally make copies of the NEFs to DNG's and burn those to DVDs stored locally. Once a month I do a complete system backup to one of two USB drives I store offsite. I alternate drives so if my house burns down or is struck by lightening during a backup I will have the latest monthly to fall back on. Storage is so cheap (an external 2Tb drive for around $100) that the only consideration for me is how much time to spend doing backups.</p>

[eric_brody]

<p>In response to Mr Clark. I have 30 years, thousands, of negatives, 35mm, 2 1/4, and 4x5. None of them are backed up except, I guess, for the ones I have scanned. Some have been lost in various moves over the years. I too never worried about them being destroyed.<br>

Destroying negatives requires a physical act, a fire, or a flood. Destroying tens of thousands of digital files can take but a spark, or a power surge. It is for that reason that digital files require a backup system. The whole thing can disappear in a flash, something we did not need to worry about with film. As I said earlier, I worry less about fire, flood, or nuclear war than I worry about a drive head briefly contacting the platter and poof, a huge number of images, some of which required hours of work in Photoshop, are gone.<br>

Eric</p>

[woodbyte]

<p>Interesting topic. Read somewhere there are two types of users - those that have lost data and who are about to. I'm amateur, but obsessive. I use an internal HD docking station and 3 x 2tb drives.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/ttake_blacx_duet/">http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/ttake_blacx_duet/</a></p>

<p>I keep one drive at my work 5 miles away locked in my desk drawer, one locked in my safe in the cellar, and one in the docking station. I rotate them all weekly. I use SyncToys 2.1 with Windows 7. I incrementally backup currently 650gb of data. I wrote a little dos batch job and have that as button on my start menu (one for each drive x,y & z). Click the button when I go to bed, it backs up and shuts down the pc when done. Sell my old backup drives and replace them every couple of years, whilst old ones still have resale value.</p>

<p>rgds<br>

james</p>

[steve m smith]

<blockquote>

<p> I worry less about fire, flood, or nuclear war than I worry about a drive head briefly contacting the platter</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Me too. My box of negatives is still o.k.</p>

[mariosforsos]

<p>Hmm... I keep my library on an external, Firewire 800, 10k rpm 2TB drive. The benefit of FW is that I can daisy chain as many of these drives as I want and have, effectively, a constantly growing database. Thankfully, LR can reference images stored on multiple locations, so...;-)))</p>

<p>At the same time, I weekly backup the WHOLE drive onto two external USB2 7200rpm 2TB drives which I store, one in my fireproof safe and another off-site. There are, in fact, two off-site-designated drives; one which is constantly off location and the other which is, at any one time, at my workplace, ready for the weekly backup. These two I simply swap every week.</p>

<p>I do not keep and DVD backups - I shoot an average of 20-30GB a week, so backing up to discs would be economically insane and VERY expensive, let alone a massive pain in the neck to recover from.</p>

<p>True, if someone decides to detonate a nuclear bomb over my city and the resulting EMP wipes my drives, I somehow think my images will be the least of my worries as I would have to tend the more pressing matter of dying either from the heat-wave or the shock wave or even the radiation. Will I die holding my camera? Quite possibly yes, but somehow I think the fact that I would know my images can be restored from my DVDs won't count as "good news"...</p>

[indraneel]

<p>If all our images were in the clouds, would aliens know what killed us?</p>

[bjscharp]

One copy on my workstation, a copy on my fileserver in the attic, and another one on a fileserver in another city, roughly 35km away.

 

All backups are automated, so anything new is usually in all three locations at last 48 hours later.

[stevenseelig]

<p>I use 4 TB drives from Western Digital and their 2TB drives inside 4 bay Drobo units. I also use Western Digital Passport drives.<br>

I generally have four copies.<br>

1. One copy on a portable passport drive where I do my work in an project specific Aperture Library. As soon as the library is constructed, I duplicate to a 4TB (Main Storage Drive). I use Super Duper to back the main storage drive to a 4 TB back up drive (Back Up Drive) and also to an off site archive drive (Archive Drive).<br>

2. Once my work is done on the project specific aperture library on the portable passport drive, I consolidate the project into my annual master library which resides on my internal drive and relocate the master picture files to the Main Storage Drive which then gets backed up to the Back Up and Archive drives.<br>

3. My internal computer drive (which holds 2-3 annual libraries.. currently my internal drive has 2009, 2010 and just starting 2011 Aperture libraries) also gets backed up and archived as well.<br>

I process about 30-35,000 images a year as RAW files. My selected pictures typically get saved as JPEG files and occasionally as TIFF files. <br>

My current projection is 4TB will last about 2 years.<br>

I am pondering as an additional legacy solution the construction of books of the best of the best pictures on a yearly basis (maybe more or less frequently), or maybe just prints. I like the concept of a high quality book as it seems less likely to be lost over the years. I will probably make 2-3 copies of each book and distribute them to kids</p>

[kris-bochenek]

<p>I keep all my files on three external hardrives. I do not keep any files on a computer it just acts as a transfer port and I use it for PP.<br>

I used to keep files on two drives but just one day one of them died! so I went out and bought two more 1TB so now everytime I take pictures I transfer them to 1TB and them to two other ones. I was thinking about getting a big one they had at Costco it was water and fire proof but I gues s I will wait for now.<br>

I like the idea of keeping one drive off site I need to look into it.</p>

[chris_letts]

<p>and however many copies you keep (1 working copy on HDD, one backup on removable HDD, and one archive on CD in my case) make sure you keep them all in different places so if your home/office or whatever gets robbed or goes up in flames you don't lose all the backups too !</p>

[tobycline]

<p>How many backups? I say a minimum of two separate ones, because with only one, if something crashes during the backup, you may lose both the original and backup data together. </p>

<p>Backup 1) Time Machine on a four bay raid-5 array. My Lightroom data also sits on this array.</p>

<p>Backup 2) I too use the Voyager dock system and rotate through three bare drives (1 TB each right now). One always stays in the Voyager dock and runs a nightly backup with SuperDuper. The other two are at relative's houses miles away, but get swapped out about once a week when we visit.</p>

<p>Backup 3) I use MobileMe to connect to a USB drive plugged into my dad's Airport Extreme a thousand miles away in Texas. Every time I import to Lightroom, I upload the latest import folder to this drive. I only store photos on this drive, and send them regularly, so the slow FTP upload doesn't take forever (takes care of the EMP and is [basically] free). </p>

<p>I wouldn't worry too much about multiple local backups. Either a drive will fail or it won't, but if a fire or flood takes away the entire house, what good was multiple drives sitting in drawers around the house? Keep one around, and the others away.</p>

<p>A neat trick with SuperDuper and multiple drives is to change the UUID's of the drives to the same ID number. That way, the computer will always think the three drives are the same, and so will SuperDuper. Then, my wife can easily swap a drive into the Voyager when I'm away on business and the scheduled backup seamlessly runs each night, no matter what drive is in the dock. Backups have to be painless and even out of mind, or they won't happen regularly. Multiple drives with SuperDuper scheduling becomes too complicated without a change in UUID numbers. This method is approved by the Shirtsleeves guys at SuperDuper.</p>

<p>For bullet proof backup strategies, read Lloyd Chambers at macperformanceguide.com </p>

<p>Cheers, and always have a SIMPLE backup plan that runs without much/any input from you! [Time Machine/SuperDuper schedules]</p>

[rossb]

<p>Old photos and negs of the family for the last 100 yrs are in a trunk in the closet. My own negatives are stored in boxes from Michaels that look like shoeboxes. Digital files are on two external hard drives. I do not take a lot of pictures so I do not need lots of memory to store then in. Mostly I am interested in family shots and vacation shots. I cull out the junk. I quit using CD's or DVD's several years ago. I do not need a burner for anything actually.</p>

[apostolos_tournas]

<p>Storage experts suggest that, for home use at least, two external hard disk backups will suffice; statistically, it is very unlikely that the prime storage unit AND the two backup disks fail at the same time.<br>

However, if one burns DVD copies of the RAW "keepers", one hard disk backup should also be OK.<br>

Paul<br>

P.S. - Can't help saying this: that's where film negatives and transparencies seem to excel.</p>

[garrison_k.]

<p><em>Since long range EMP bombs are thermonuclear devices, one would definitely ruin my day - and the least of my worries if a thermonuclear device detonated in my vicinity would be the loss of my photos. Let's get real about threats. A house fire or flood is much more likely.</em><br /> <br /><em> [Yes, Garrison, I know there are non-nuclear EMP bombs, but their effect is very focused and very short ranged. I doubt than any of us will be the target of one. The usual target of one is a Command and Control Center or other such high value military targets; the delivery vehicle is a Cruise Missile. ]</em><br /> <br /><em> Back to the original poster's question...</em></p>

<p>Sorry you took me seriously and wasted all that effort, Brooks.</p>

<p><em>The OP has a very good question. How does one backup and archive what use to be considered a huge amount of data and do it economically? I have yet to find a good answer.</em></p>

<p>There's no conundrum as there's only a few options, Brooks. All of which are getting cheaper every day.</p>

<p>If I only stored on hdd's and was a Window user, I'd be really concerned about replicating and migrating viruses. This is why I like the cloud and dvd. And we'll be working in cloud soon anyways.</p>

[huntrbll]

<p>Ironically, Thom Hogan just posted an article about this very subject today. It makes very good reading, and because of it I am going to change a couple of my habits. The link to the article is <a href="http://www.bythom.com/risk.htm">http://www.bythom.com/risk.htm</a></p>