Podcast suggestion - digital file preservation

[SlipJigPiper]

Marko-
Digital photographers face a media storage and preservation concern that grows daily. How do we ensure that those hard-earned pictures survive hard disk crashes and acts of nature? Backups are the obvious answer. I'd like to hear what professionals consider as "best practices" on media options as well as frequency and scope of the backups. Also information on the use of RAID systems in this context would be appreciated.
Thanks for a great podcast.
Mike

[Greg_Nuspel]

Most do not see RAID as a back-up, one good power spike and it can all be gone. I think this is a good but very controversial topic.

[Alex Wilson]

RAID is expensive, and I generally think of it not as for backup as much as it is for systems that need high-availability and can fail-over gracefully.

A better option might be a hard-drive toaster. Depends how much you shoot.

Personally, I backup all my RAW files to DVD, with a second copy stored at a different location. After 5 years you should be re-burning them.

I have another set of DVDs for edits (and yet another copy of the RAW files converted to DNG)... I only have one copy of these, so I'm living a little dangerously.

I use WhereIsIt to index everything so I can find files. Files and folders are all named by shoot date so I can find stuff easily. No point archiving stuff if you can't find it.

I just finished working on the last of my 2008 stuff.... 2TB of raw files, and 4TB of edits... $50 worth of blank DVDs for that is *way* cheaper than the thousands it would cost to RAID that much data.

That said, I spend a fair bit of time burning.

[edbayani11]

maybe an external/portable hard drive. they are nuch cheaper and convenient for archiving

[Greg_Nuspel]

If you run external drives use minimum 2 duplicates and you need a program to do a data check. I have heard of people backing up only to discover data errors when they go to recover data.

[Marko]

Hey thanks for the suggestion but backup/tech topics are not really my specialty and although they are part of digital photography I much prefer to focus on the art of creating photos...so I may get to this eventually, but it's way down on the list...sorry about that...

Personally....I use 2 external backup drives that are the same size as my computer's hard drive. 1 drive makes an exact image of my computer's HD so I can take that external and plug it in to any computer and work immediately.
The other backup drive compresses the data into chunks.
I use Acronis 11 to make both backups and so far so good! (I'm on windows btw)
Hope that helps
Marko

[kat]

I read an article on this in American Photo(graphy) magazine that I just got. It was pretty good..listed the different ways and products.

Also had an article on how to store your photos and good programs.

[Alex Wilson]

Hey thanks for the suggestion but backup/tech topics are not really my specialty and although they are part of digital photography I much prefer to focus on the art of creating photos...so I may get to this eventually, but it's way down on the list...sorry about that...

I would say that it's part of a good work-flow, and having a good work-flow means you get to spend more time making art, while also making sure you aren't leaving yourself open to horrible disaster.

One of the wonderful advantages of digital is you can make a perfect copy. With film, there's always the risk of damaging/losing a slide or negative and the image being gone. With digital, it doesn't take too much effort to have a second backup copy, and a whole lot more peace of mind :)

[Iguanasan]

Right now I have all my shots on my laptop and backup to a portable drive so I still have an issue if my house burns down. I'm in the process of upgrading. My plan is to use Hamachi to put a NAS device at my friend's house and backup my laptop to that and he's going to put one at my house.

I've thought about using online services, however, I don't quite have that much confidence in any of the services and I don't like the idea of a subscription model where I have to pay them for the rest of my life.

Managing this much data is a pain, to be sure!

[Greg_Nuspel]

Anyone use tape backup? I'm thinking of this option so I can keep several tapes at different locations.

[Marko]

Wow tape eh? I've not used it but it's very old school and supposedly VERY reliable but slow.

BTW - I blogged about backups about 10 months ago and got some good comments in case people are interested.
http://www.photography.ca/blog/?p=72

[Greg_Nuspel]

For me speed isn't a big deal the backup can run overnight. I like the reliability of the system.

[AcadieLibre]

I work off three external drives, two are kept at home and are duplicates of just music and photos, anything else I can replace. The 3rd is kept in a safety deposit box that is brought home every 3 to 4 weeks and is backup with what the the current drives have had added to them. Then the that day or the next it goes back to the safety deposit box.

I have had numerous set ups with varying amount of hard drives but this is my current set up, 3 tb drive each with 2 500 gb in each case has two drives should one drive fail. It may sound a bit over done but I have lost a drive before and lost minimal amount because I keep all my old drives and they are stored, if not I would have lost all my family photos. If you have a fire, flood and all your back ups are at your home what good are they. Looking to increase drives to 2 TB soon.

Once you get the set up going it is just time to upgrade to bigger back ups. I never format old drives and just store them, and I never give them away, after a several years I take a hammer to them and destroy them in little pieces. I donate the rest of the parts of my old computers but my HD's are never are given away. I believe in overkill in Data Back up, once SSD become affordable that will be how I will go, I would never trust a CD, DVD with anything I consider valuable. To unreliable.

[AntZ]

This is the setup that works for me. I have a folder on my desktop pc mapped to my notebook and set as an "Offline Folder". When I take my images of CF card in Lightroom it puts the images in this offline folder, windows automatically syncs these folders. This means I have access to my photos on my notebook if I am at home or not. When I am away from home, new images get put in the offline folder and then sync next time I am at home. In actual fact I almost never use the home desktop.
I also then use SyncToy2 to copy the files from my desktop to a network drive(NAS). The sync relationship is set to not copy deletions, so if I delete(on purpose or accident) a file in my original folder it is not deleted on the backup.

This is for my images only. I use lightroom which has a catalogue file which should also be backed up since that is where all my edits are stored. Problem is that Lightroom will not allow you to store your catalogue on a network drive. So every now and then I copy the catalogue file to my home pc manually. This is the only thing I need to do manually.

Of course apart from when my notebook is not at home, this is not off site backup, and if my house burned down I'd loose the lot. I do occasionally burn to DVD and leave off site.

[jellotranz]

Raid... Well running raid 5 which is stiping with parity will save you against a single disk failure.. In theory. We had a Dell raid array.. 14 drives.. one day it marked 8 disks bad and munches all the data on the disk subsystem when it attempted to rebuild the raid.. NOT GOOD.

Best option, 2 USB 1 terabyte drives, and just mirror the data from one to the other, then unplug the backup disk. Only plugin the backup disk when you are going to back it up. If you are running Vista robocopy will to a nice job of keeping the disks synced. This is how I do it.

/dev/md0 1.8T 971G 770G 56% /Photos
/dev/md1 1.8T 971G 770G 56% /Photo-backup