External Storage solutions?

[mendel_leisk]

<p>My setup:</p>

<p>I have C: and D:, two separate drives. No RAID. In C: is folder C:/RAW. All my important raw files are there, in various sub-folders. Similar albeit a bit more complicated folder structure is used on C: for all the jpegs.</p>

<p>Then on D: I the same folder structure.</p>

<p>I periodically sync D: with C: via ROBOCOPY using the /MIR option. This is a simple command line utility, built into Win7.</p>

<p>I also periodically burn double DVD copies of the raws, whenever there's enough to fill a few DVDs. One stays at home, one at the office.</p>

[brad_smith8]

<p>This one allows eight 3TB drives for 24TB. It's eSATA/USB 3.0.<br>

<a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817576012">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817576012</a></p>

[bkkstudios]

<p>A topic dear to my heart after losing 5y of files one day. I believe you always need 2-3 real-time backups and 2 non real-time backups.</p>

<p>So I do 'D' drive RAID (2x3TB). Then I have 'E' drive backup (3TB) in the same PC. I backup to E every week. This is geographical co-location.</p>

<p>For geographical separation, I do 5*3TB NAS RAID, same room, and 5*3TB different room RAID. </p>

<p>The problem with NAS RAID is the disks need to be the same, so practically, it ends up that an upgrade makes no sense, and you just buy a new NAS every 2y. It's painful. But more painful is losing everything.</p>

<p> </p>

[bkkstudios]

<p>A topic dear to my heart after losing 5y of files one day. I believe you always need 2-3 real-time backups and 2 non real-time backups.</p>

<p>So I do 'D' drive RAID (2x3TB). Then I have 'E' drive backup (3TB) in the same PC. I backup to E every week. This is geographical co-location.</p>

<p>For geographical separation, I do 5*3TB NAS RAID, same room, and 5*3TB different room RAID. </p>

<p>The problem with NAS RAID is the disks need to be the same, so practically, it ends up that an upgrade makes no sense, and you just buy a new NAS every 2y. It's painful. But more painful is losing everything.</p>

<p> </p>

[ellis_vener_photography]

Ziggy writes: "So I do 'D' drive RAID (2x3TB). Then I have 'E' drive backup (3TB) in the same PC. I backup to E every

week."

 

Is that RAID 0 (striping - no redundancy) or RAID 1 (mirroring - 2 copies of each file)?

 

Your NAS: is that RAID 0, 1, 5 or 10?

 

Drobo and Synology both have products that allow you to increase the amout of storage by adding larger capacity drives

over time.

 

I've been doing a lot of research into this and the most authoritative studies I've found (Google and Carnagie-Mellon

University) both indicate that the rate of HDD failure increases in year 3 of use.

 

Hopefully you are using HDD'S that are designed for 24/7 NAS or RAID use.

[fxt1]

<p>Still digesting all of this - thank you so much, this is incredibly helpful..<br>

Ellis, your suggestions seem to make the most logical sense for my particular system.. I do already keep the OS & app disk separate on all my machines (still got 400gb on that), on the new machine I intend to put as much RAM as possible.. I think I'll probably start a separate thread on this subject, as I'm doing a custom build and could use some feedback on componants..</p>

<p>So - the plan is, build a new computer with loads of RAM, some more drive bays to temporarily keep me going for another few years (I seem to get through a TB of data around every 9 months) - buy a separate 'temporary' backup system (A RAID 5, RAID 6 or Drobo 5N - need to investigate: Drobo 5, Synology, OWC, QNAP, and Western Digital Sentinel 4000) to archive all files that aren't hot (this is true - I have maybe 500gb of recent shoots I need to access instantly, the rest are archives from previous years and need to be incredibly well backed up and quick to search through, but don't need to be part of the main system).. </p>

<p>I like the idea of doing a weekly backup to a third system hosted elsewhere.. but with my amount of data, is that even possible? Is there some clever thing that can just do an auto-backup of new data or data changes... perhaps to a server system that I could theoretically access remotely.. it does seem a bit of a waste to have two identical backup systems if neither serves an additional purpose other than to foolproof me.. but maybe that's me being naive..</p>

<p>Just to clarify - I do have a wireless hub with gigabit ethernet ports.. are you suggesting that I hook the NAS up to that by wired ethernet, as well as my main editing computer - and if so, is that a quicker way of reading/writing data than if I were to use e-sata, firewire or usb 3 etc?</p>

<p>Again, thank you so much - this is incredibly helpful. </p>

[David_Cavan]

<p>F Thomas - your back and archive strategy should be based on how often your files change. If you truly only have 500gb of "active" files and the rest are inactive you could think about a simple strategy, at least initially. Backing up the non-active files once to hard drives, stored elsewhere would provide security for those. That should be checked occasionally since things can go wrong, but perhaps that's every 90 days, or even 6 months. The "active" files could be backed up to cheap, 1TB media more often (maybe weekly?) and stored elsewhere on some kind of rotating basis, with two or three back-up devices. </p>

<p>The difference is that non-active files are archived, while the active files are in an easy back-up and restore mode.</p>

<p>Although I'm sure you could setup an active backup strategy using internet capability, and even use the cloud I think the above method is simple, and much cheaper.</p>