Back up Back up Back up

Zerodog

This year I have been pretty busy. Lots of events and various shoots. Been filled a 2tb drive since about this time last year. I use a couple Lacie Big 2 quadras as my main back up for my LR catalogs and pics. Pretty safe. RAID 1 configuration with 2 mirrored drives. Safe until.......

Your wife/ assistant plugs in a 20volt laptop power supply to your 12volt Lacie.:uhoh Both drives not reading. So they went off for data recovery. I have some stuff on other computers and drives. Not a total loss yet. I am now keeping my fingers crossed for the goods to come back intact. This is my entire 2012! One thing I do know is this lesson will be EXPENSIVE. It starts at $400 and could go up over $3000. I am such a fricken idiot. I have been thinking about this. I had 2 drives that were going to be my back ups. They ended up being used as working drive/ backups at events.

I have just ordered 7 drives. 4 to rebuild 2 Big2 Quadras and 2 for backup external drives. Leaving 1 for my 2012 archive to be stored offsite.

BACK your stuff up. It is expensive, it is boring, but it needs to happen when you count on your pics making you money, especially in the future.

Ed911

No doubt...back up is good. My daughter, had her drive die just as she was getting ready to upload her website date from a developer...cost for recovery, $1400. The drive had to be shipped off to a lab with a cleanroom...repaired, and then read onto a new drive, which she received in the mail.

All drives will fail, it's just when.

Hope everything is recoverable.

paddler4

Zerodog--

I was already backing up before your posting, but now I am (again) worrying about another aspect of this: it is risky to have your backup and original in the same location. Water damage, a power problem, a fire, etc., could knock out both. I now use an external drive in the same room as a backup, and that is not very safe.

So, the question is how to keep them offsite. Here's what I have been thinking of:

1. Keep the current work on a 1 TB internal drive, backing up the cloud, e.g., Carbonite.
2. When that internal drive is getting full, copy it to two drives as archives. One stays home, one gets stored someplace else. The internal drive is cleaned up up for the next batch, and the carbonite backup of the old batch is deleted.

One problem with this is that external drives are bulky. So, I have been thinking of buying a cradle so that I can use regular drives, which are now very small, for the backup of no longer current work.

Does this sound nuts?

Zerodog

One of the problems with cloud storage is cost. When I looked into it, it was ridiculous. But I have a situation where we shoot 1000's of pics at events. So for normal storage, maybe not a problem.

I wish it was a good option for me to do. Next best thing is loading original sizes to your website. But again not the best option all around. Upload time is longer with full size than resized. And you don't get your RAW files.

No I don't think your idea is crazy at all. But committing to it, and implementing a solid back up plan can be harder than it seems to be too. Stuff can take a very long time to move. I opted for ESATA and USB 3.0 housings for drives. I currently use ESATA with my Lacies. Using bare drives in a little rack is not the best option either. They are fragile and should be in a good housing to help protect them. And again. If they share a common power supply, you are at risk. You could have a power spike of some sort. Like your wife "helping" you sort some pics and plugging in the wrong cord. I now am a firm believer in completely separate devices for redundant storage.

perroneford

My solution:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00471HK0Q/ref=asc_df_B00471HK0Q2287444?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&tag=pg-471-01-20&linkCode=asn&creative=395097&creativeASIN=B00471HK0Q

For about $1.50 per disc, I can write my Lightroom catalogs with RAW files to optical media. I also back up my LR full catalog to the cloud. With that and my RAWs, I can recreate all my work. Keep those off site. Opticals are not susceptible to electrical spikes or power issues. They are waterproof. They are easy to store and cheap to buy.

At home, I have two 4TB RAIds that are redundant and get mirrored per hour. I also upload full sized jpgs to my hosting server. I cant protect against everything, but I can protect against a lot.

divamum

One word: Crashplan (or, if you prefer, Backblaze).

Zerodog

Good news is data is recoverable. Bad news is $1800 :wow This is an expensive lesson.

ZBlack

My backup requirements are very minimal compared to those shooting for a lot of clients and events, but I do a fairly standard process I think. I still shoot several thousand images a year, but 80% of those are just for fun/personal shooting. And this is all done on my desktop computer. If I'm shooting at an event, I have those files saved on the laptop for the time being, then they get imported on my main machine at home.

I have a working internal drive that everything is imported to and stays there for the year. I don't shoot enough to fill a drive so that works for me.

Then have those files backed up to an external drive sitting on my desk. Followed by CrashPlan for my cloud backup. CrashPlan itself does the external drive backup while uploading and it checks for new files or updates twice a day.

The initial upload certainly takes a while, but roughly 1tb took me a few days to get uploaded, but after that it's pretty fast and runs in the background. My ISP doesn't limit the amount of data per month so that is definitely something to consider if yours does.

After the years end I will start with a new internal and external drive for the next calendar year. Most images clients want are already on the my site at this time for their access, but the external is nearby if I need access.

Really sorry to hear what happened, that can't be fun at all and that's quite an unexpected expense. Glad it is recoverable though.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I717 using Tapatalk 2

nhpace

Crashplan (www.crashplan.com) is a great option. I use the Crashplan+ service that costs ~$10/mo. With this plan you can backup unlimited amount of data from a number of computers on your network. I have a MacBook Pro that backs up everything using Time Capsule and archive data to a Netgear ReadyNAS (RAID5 NAS). I also have a Ubuntu linux server that mounts the NAS shares via NFS. Crashplan runs on both my MacBook Pro and on the linux server. In total, my backup set is ~400GB. I also see no noticible degradation of performance on on my MacBook Pro while Crashplan is running. So far, its proven to be a great service and very affordable.