How do you back up your files?

[croc307]

How I miss shooting film. Shoot > Process > Hard copy > Done!

[CatCynic]

No - never leave an external drive on 24/7 - they almost never spin down the drive, leading to wearing out the drive in ridiculously short time.

[CatCynic]

Originally Posted by croc307

How I miss shooting film. Shoot > Process > Hard copy > Done!

Not true. If you wanted to ensure the longevity of your negatives (the sort of thing that we are backing up) you had to store them in a refrigerator. Negatives were/are a somewhat fragile backup medium, too.

If all you wanted was the hard copy, you could print your digital images, and with modern printing technology, you'd have a print with equivalent longevity to the prints you got from your film.

The big advantage with digital is that backup is easier (duplicating negatives was a fiddly busy, and could lose resolution). The big disadvantage with digital is that we tend to take more shots, so there's more to backup

[CatCynic]

There seems to be a trend here to regard RAID as being RAID 1 (mirrored drive) - that's not the only kind of RAID out there.

I strongly advocate using a RAID 5 cluster for online storage of images - use four 500Gb drives and get a RAID 5 cluster of 1.5Tb (1500Gb) - space loss is only 25%, not 50% (as it is with mirrored drives). You can get a box like a Thecus N5200 (will take up to 5 drives) and have a large chunk of storage on your LAN for a small price. The Thecus doesn't look like a server - it's tiny - for those worried about someone stealing a server. The big advantage of using a RAID cluster (NOT a mirrored drive) is that you can suffer a drive failure and recover - replace the dead drive and the RAID hardware will rebuild what was lost using the redundant data (mirrored drive can theoretically do this, but I've had the bad drive overwrite the good one, which is awful). Oh, and this RAID cluster MUST be connected to a UPS. I have two RAID volumes, on separate servers, on separate UPSs, in separate rooms, on separate power circuits. (I have three phase power into my house, and the two servers are on separate phases) I have copies of my images on both RAIDs, and keep them in sync.

I use external drives for backup, too. But I try hard to have two copies of everything on external drives. I'm using 400Gb Seagates for my backup drives.

My practice is to read the CF cards onto the RAID, and check them. Then burn a DVD copy of the shoot - given that I use 4Gb CF cards, it's one DVD-R for each card I've shot. I use the best quality media I can find (Taiyo-Yuden Master grade media), and I keep the discs in soft slip covers (not jewel cases). Then I back up the images onto one or two external hard drives. Only then do I consider re-using the CF cards.

I am not as thorough as I'd like to be in the matter of off-site backup, but I could store my burnt copies off-site. I'm looking into fire-proof storage for media, but it's not as easy as fire-proof storage for paper (media are damaged at lower temperatures). Ideally, I'd like a fire-proof media safe - protect from fire and burglary at the same time.

I am not (yet) doing too much backup. Not sure that there is such a thing

[nakins]

Raid 6 is interesting too.