Anybody heard of the new kid on the block? It's called 'Transformer' and it works like your own PRIVATE drop-box. I don't like/trust on-line back-ups so the Transformer option sounds good - and you have off-site covered with no effort too. It will be interesting to see how it takes off. Still in the embryonic stages at the moment.

I use Time Machine for the "normal" backups as well. In addition to that I do a backup of my image library from Aperture onto a additional hard drive that I only connect for the backup about once a week or after uploading a lot of new images. On that same drive I create a bootable backup of my entire hard drive using Super Duper. Call me paranoid, but you never know...

What I really like about the Aperture backup is that it creates a folder with all the images that have been deleted since the last backup. So they are not lost completely.

PB PM said:
Time machine works, but an additional backup is recommended. I don't know about LR, but Aperture has a backup archive and I use that for my additional backup (along with another full system disk backup).

Good to know- it's a mess since I had been using Windows computers up till 2008 or so and I've been backing up photos on both Windows and Mac because I didn't trust my Mac back then. Now they're on 2 machines. I used to manually back up photos, but Time Machine has been wonderful. I only have one true backup on Time Machine however. My older shots are on two external hard drives.

msmoto said:
@ NSXType-R... no one can be more "computer challenged" than I am. I publish all the keeper photos to Flicker at about 3000px size. So, I can always download one of my own if needed. But, I do have my photos off the main hard drive, and I backup my desktop to a separate hard drive as well. Currently my Time Machine is not able to maintain a constant connection for reasons I do not know, so the entire computer does not get backed up.

I think copying the important information like Lightroom and the NEF images onto a separate disc is a good idea.

I used to back things up manually, but I end up with missing files because I had two backups. It's a bit messy, but trusting something like Time Machine seems to be a bit easier.

By the way, Light Room organizes your shots... right? I have no idea because my friend gave me a copy. I used to use Picasa.

Thanks for the encouraging words!

@ NSXType-R... no one can be more "computer challenged" than I am. I publish all the keeper photos to Flicker at about 3000px size. So, I can always download one of my own if needed. But, I do have my photos off the main hard drive, and I backup my desktop to a separate hard drive as well. Currently my Time Machine is not able to maintain a constant connection for reasons I do not know, so the entire computer does not get backed up.

I think copying the important information like Lightroom and the NEF images onto a separate disc is a good idea.

Time machine works, but an additional backup is recommended. I don't know about LR, but Aperture has a backup archive and I use that for my additional backup (along with another full system disk backup).

So... how do you guys back up your shots now?

Does anyone use Time Machine?

I'm going to move my photos to the Mac side. My folders are such a mess.

And I also just got Light Room 3. I'm still such a noob on the tech side of things.

That really is a heart breaking story.

I have suffered similar in the past, mostly because I was using cheap RAID cards.

The problem is that the RAID cards (and most NAS units) store the information in a proprietary manner, so no other machine can read the RAID set. It was also difficult to talk with these cards and determine what had gone wrong; or give them instruction to correct the problem.

One of the benefits of deciding to use ZFS was that it is operating system independent. I would fully expect to take a set of drives running ZFS and put them in any other machine that reads ZFS and it should mount them.

The one exception is the "level" of ZFS. eg. my Linux boxes uses Fuse which is level 23, so I can mount drives created on that, on my Open Indiana box which is ZFS level 28 - but not the reverse.

Also, it is interface independent ... meaning I could take the three SATA drives out of my server case, put them in external USB drive cases and mount them to another machine, via USB!

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD, so a ZFS set created on a NAS box that uses FreeNAS should be mountable and readable on a computer running FreeBSD.

Effectively, a NAS box is just a server/pc in a more compact and dedicated format; but if I was considering a NAS box, I would definitely run a test ... create a set on the FreeNAS box and see if I could mount them on another machine.

Well I wish I had read this post back when it started, would made my thinking a bit different.

I would agree now, yep, have two physical locations to keep your information if it means that much to you.

My story:

I had never had but one hard drive failure up until about a month ago. That once was a segate drive so after that I have always used WD drives but now that seems pretty much pointless, every manufacture's of hard drives will have failures, just some more than others. I was able to recover all the information from the segate drive after using a program called restorer 2000.

I back up my pictures on a D-link 343 with 4 2TB hard drives, set up as RAID 1 so I had fast access plus a pure backup. This set up gave me two drives with each having two (2)TB hard drives (for now I will just say UNIT 1 and UNIT 2). I came home one day and could access UNIT 1 but could not add any information to it...I thought this was odd so I investigated the issue. After about an hour of going into the diagnostics of the NAS, it told me that both hard drives in UNIT 1 had failed. Okay ouch but fortunately for me most of my information was on UNIT 2 and was like wow that was a close one. I went out and bought two new 2TB drives to replace the failed ones. I put them in and the NAS asked me a few questions, then should have started to format what would be UNIT 1. At this point it wouldn't even show the drives in UNIT 1 using the NAS web interface, UNIT 2 was still running fine. Here is where this gets nasty.

I got on the phone with D-link about the device and after troubleshooting with me for about 15 min they told me to power down my NAS and remove UNIT 2(both drives and remember which slot they came from). I took the advice, powered down took the drives out and labeled them. Restarted the NAS and the forced the NAS to do a complete format like I was instructed, after this UNIT 1 came back to life. Then I was told to power down the NAS and insert UNIT 2 (of course made sure that each drive was placed exactly where it came from, they told me if I did this the NAS would remember the drives and would not have a problem with the data on UNIT 2 - I specifically asked if it would be affected or even had the chance, they told me no). I did what they told me and everything looked good. I went into the diagnostics of the NAS and verified all the drives where there and was like cool no big deal problem solved.

UH no...needless to say I came back a day later and I guess the NAS decided that UNIT 2 needed to be formatted on a scheduled backup. I am now trying to recover the data from UNIT 2 but not sure how good a format took place. I went back to my restorer 2000 program and it would not see a RAID drive, I went back to the website and purchased the upgraded program restorer ultamite and it see's the drive and some information but I have not been able to get it off yet (its scanning the disk now and will take a day or two before its done at the rate its going).

I am now thinking a server might be a better solution than a NAS but one thing is for sure, never a D-link product again in my home. I took one of the drives from UNIT 1 and put it in my computer and reformatted the drive just to see what would happen, it now works fine (did like 4 complete scans and no bad sectors or anything appeared). I now will try to access the data from the other drive from UNIT 1 but it will have to wait until the drive from UNIT 2 is done.

sorry for the long story but hope someone can use that and not repeat my mistake.

Oh yeh, I love ZFS. So easy to use; set it up, let it run and forget about it.

I can't believe that companies facing adapting to use SD-XC have paid a licence to Microsoft for an inferior format when they could have used open source ZFS and put a bit of money behind writing a driver to ship with the cameras. Same goes for video, OGG is great quality at good compression. Would have saved a lot of licensing money and our camera gear might have been a little cheaper.

That schools only teach our children Microsoft things is a scandal; there is so much solid stuff out there that they never get to experience. At least in the US, Apple has a greater presence in everyday life than the UK. We're all brainwashed! Some teachers even think Linux is a virus!

Agreed, Oracle taking over Sun; very bad. Unfortunately someone had to; but like you say, another discussion, another place.

msknight said:
At home I have a large tower PC. It runs an operating system called Open Indiana;

OOOhhhh.... Solaris and ZFS... I use it at work (day job, where I have about 70 such servers to admin).

Such a shame that Oracle took over Sun... but that's a subject for somewhere else, not here.

Nice to know that there is someone else on here using it too ;-)

I first got involved with CD burning back in the day when a writer cost the best part of a thousand UK pounds and was 1x write speed only. I wouldn't choose to back up to CD/DVD. If I had no option, though, I'd use quality DVD+R media to do it and be careful about storage conditions, particularly humidity.

At home I have a large tower PC. It runs an operating system called Open Indiana; a fork of Open Solaris. The reason is because it uses ZFS. You can read up on ZFS here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

Long story short...

1) It has a number of possible RAID configurations for resilience, depending on taste.
2) I run a, "scrub," automatically once a month to ensure the data is refreshed and sound.
3) It has a really easy to obtain status screen which I obtain every hour and publish to my personal web site; so whenever I open a browser window, I see the hard drive health.
4) The data set can be expanded by switching hard drives one at a time with minimal overall down time.
5) The file system was designed from the ground up by SUN engineers in 2004 and goes from strength to strength. It is prepared to handle Zetabyte amounts of data on a single pool.
6) It is just so darn easy to handle and is operating system independent.
7) It rocks. Simple as that. I can't understand why companies didn't chose to use ZFS on SD-XC cards and bundle a driver to customers.

The server is attached to an inexpensive UPS unit which also protects against surges.

For backup, two eSATA 3 ports connect to an external drive unit where I can plug in two hard drives (with the system still running) and those (which are connected as a ZFS mirror pair) receive 1tb of information in about 5.5 hours. They can then be unmounted and taken off site.

There are explanations on ZFS and my server set up on my YouTube channel - http://www.youtube.com/msknight5 - but be prepared for monotone droning. Also, the Open Solaris set up is out of date; the Open Indiana set up is much easier but very slightly different.

If you want to avoid the hassle but like what you read about ZFS, then there are NAS units that make use of ZFS out there.

So ... all machines read and write to the server for resilient long term storage and high accessibility. Tablets, internet ready TVs, my Xbox, all can read pictures and film from the server. No messing around copying suff.

Backing up to a ZFS mirror pair of external drives which are then taken off site, (and don't require me to down the server to attach them) is really cool. I'm also aware that ZFS can detect and repair errors that other file systems wouldn't know about.

Small correction: RAID10, implemented properly (i.e. two mirrors striped, rather than two stripes mirrored - there's a difference), will actually tolerate two drive failures, provided the two failures are from different mirrors.

But anyway...

I won't take this diversion any further, but it's not really a question of opinion.

RAID 5 and RAID 10 both are equally tolerant of failure, one disk. (Equal protection)
They have near-equal speeds, with RAID 10 having a maximum read/write speed multiplier equal to the number of spindles, while RAID 5 has one of the number of spindles minus 1.

LAS? You'll see an advantage for RAID 10 equal to the calculation above. But I was responding specifically to someone talking about a NAS box. In a NAS situation with four modern drives both RAID 10 and RAID 5 will saturate GB ethernet. No speed difference at all, as RAID performance is not your choke point.

The "checksum" generation issue only exists with cheap hardware controllers. An Atom can keep up with a GB/s worth of calcs: http://www.howtofixcomputers.com/forums/storage/building-own-nas-237622.html#post1002489 eight to ten times the performance needed to saturate the heaviest of setups.

drab - have to disagree with You, except for the gain in capacity, the speed factor is very negotiable as RAID 5 generates a lot of checksums, way to much IMHO for feeling secure. and with today hdd prices the capacity shouldn't be a big problem unless You record HD video.

adamz said:
with four drives why didn't You go for RAID 1+0 configuration, do You utilize this 4TB of data?

Because with four drives a good RAID 5 gives you equal protection to raid 10, near equal speed (yes raid 5 can be set to stripe it's writes in many implementations), and more capacity?

Could someone point me to simpleton's guide to backing up using RAID and all its configurations and connections

I am aware I probably need something bigger and more sophisticated the an external 1TB drive connected via a eSATA connection

ithurtswhenipee said:
Wow, old thread but...
[...] It has 4 1.5 TB hot swappable hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration for a total of approximately 4 TB of usable space. I can also daisy chain additional NAS devices if I use up that space. This offers data redundancy if a drive fails - just pull out the bad one and put in a new one and the drive syncs with the array. [...]

with four drives why didn't You go for RAID 1+0 configuration, do You utilize this 4TB of data?

ithurtswhenipee said:
It is pretty painless to setup

...but does it still hurt when you pee?

ithurtswhenipee said:
I use a NAS device on my internal network. (Thecus 4100 Pro) I can access it remotely as well. It has 4 1.5 TB hot swappable hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration for a total of approximately 4 TB of usable space. I can also daisy chain additional NAS devices if I use up that space. This offers data redundancy if a drive fails - just pull out the bad one and put in a new one and the drive syncs with the array.

What do you do in case of a house fire? Theft? Power surge? Software file corruption?

Wow, old thread but...

I use a NAS device on my internal network. (Thecus 4100 Pro) I can access it remotely as well. It has 4 1.5 TB hot swappable hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration for a total of approximately 4 TB of usable space. I can also daisy chain additional NAS devices if I use up that space. This offers data redundancy if a drive fails - just pull out the bad one and put in a new one and the drive syncs with the array.

It is pretty painless to setup, but I do say that as an IT professional. The included manual should be sufficient to get most people up and running.

I just got a BlackArmor® NAS 220 from Seagate to be used as a backup storage for my photos. It is a RAID1 box, with two hard disks.

The NAS will be connected to my home LAN, hidden somewhere in my house just in case some burglars come to visit.

Currently at homge we have three desktop computers and I have my photos mirrored in the three computers, so if one disk goes away, I can still get the photos.. now the NAS will contain the fourth copy of them.

Using USB is to dangerous as I learned from experience. If you are charged with some static electricity, you may damage the USB device when connecting to the PC.

Using magnetic tapes to backup is also a possibility, but the tapes should be stored on a different location and be checked for corruption as well.

One more disclaimer about online backup, many ISP's have bandwidth caps on their service. Here in Canada many people have a 25-60GB monthly caps. overage charges here are more than a 1$ a GB.

So check with your provider before uploading hundreds of Gigs. I happen to be an an unlimited plan, but to get more speed, i tend to go to the library or my university, as they provide very high upload speeds.

I have 400 GB in photos, backed-up in 4 external drives (2 desktop, 2 portable). 3 other externals drives have failed in time.

With the Nikon D7000 delivering more pixels and HD video, for sure will increase my need for space.

Looking at Amazon, there are Blue – Ray burners for about $150 (example Asus USB 2.0 Slim External 6x Blu-Ray Writer SBW-06C1S-U). I thought they were more expensive, so I´m considering getting one. Any experience with this model will be appreciated.

I’m installing Backblaze (15 days trail) in order to have an online backup.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

Alfonso

A great thread, I use a external 1TB eSata Western Digital now, it is switched off between backups. A lot of my older Photo's are on an external 500GB, which is now unplugged. Internally I use a 300GB drive as my main drive and a 1TB WD green as my storage, I immediately put my photo's on that after a shoot. On that drive I have a folder with the year, inside that I have 12 folders for months and then my work is in folders with the days date and the main subject matter. I back-up to the external once a month.

I had an internal drive pack up on me, it was a Seagate 500GB; I was able to recover around 90% of my files, I lost around 20 photo's. I can't remember the software I used, I think it was trial ware.

gelu88, I was very interested in reading what you wrote about on line storage. A friend of mine suggested that to me in case my house was either burgled or I had a fire. I never got around to looking into it, but after reading your post it has made me decide to do it. I think in the UK there are free options.

Thanks for reviving the thread, always a good idea to remind people of backing up.

My local backups are nothing special: a 1TB NAS in the basement.

But i would STRONGLY recommend people also backup online. I have about 300gigs backed up on Mozy. Though they just crippled their service so i'll have to switch. (either carbonite or backblaze)

Check this great overview of what each service offers and their advantages/limitations:
http://lifehacker.com/5749845/the-best-alternatives-to-mozy-for-big-or-unlimited-backups

The biggest problem with online backup is getting hundreds of gigs up there to begin with, but once its there its the best possible single form of backup.

I don't use it, but Crashplan has a service where they will send you an external drive, which you send back and they'll seed the backup for you. After that daily backups are generally not too big (most people can upload 2-4gigs a day without issue). They also have a "restore to you door" thing where they will send you an external drive with your stuff if you need it, negating the need to download 100's of gigs.

apart from backing up, most of these services let you access all your files remotely, which is great too.

Plus, its about $50 a year. So even if you wont get everything up, its so cheap you might as well get your most important stuff.