If I lost my digital photo library, there is no question – I would die “the end”
A lot of the time when I start Lightroom, I will just skip over the “backup now” mainly because I am either not at my desk with my laptop and therefore not connected to my main backup drives, or I am flat out of space (which is currently the case!)
More after the break…
To give you an idea what I’m talking about when I say photo library, let’s look at my typical habits for shooting. I’m a pro music photographer, in that I (sometimes) get paid for taking photos of bands, live or otherwise. So, a typical night shooting for me is “three songs, no flash”- U2, 461 images, 9.83 gb of images in that three minute shoot… So – yes, a lot of file per shoot…
I am currently set up as follows.. G-Tech (500gb g-raid mini) to G-Tech (G-Drive2 1.5tb) to G-Tech (G-Safe 1tb) …err, let me draw you a diagram… So, yes, all these attached drives are full, and, more worringly, they’re all (aside of the G-Safe) making some VERY weird noises – I have a theory on hard drives.. They’re either Dying or Dead – only two states. The 1.5tb is about to die and the mini is from time to time giving me “the click of death”
So, what do I do? My backup drive (Which is actually on loan from G-Tech and a review model) is the only drive working AND I need to give it back… I have 3tb of data, plus the contents of my MacBook Pro (Another 320gb of which there is only 50gb available) that has to go some place.
No, I’ve painted you a picture – I have a hose, constantly running and I have a tank that is SO full it’s splashing over the top.. Now, let me add an extra element for you – “M” – That’s right, my better half… She’s a PC user and me, I’m mostly on the Mac these days… So – the storage has to be shared between PC and Mac, has to be solidly backed up daily and has to be large.
Disks, they’re cheap! 1.5tb for about £65 if you shop around – but then you either need a caddy or a computer to host them. But then, you have disks, they fill up and you’re back in the same spot… So, you need disks that can be added to a volume? – See, it can get complicated VERY fast.
Someone mentioned yesterday – get a tape drive, well, I’m OK with that, but it’s space – literally, where I live, here in London, a one bed flat has about enough space to .. well… do nothing in! I have my printer balanced on top of our bookcase, let alone another backup drive.
So – I buy a caddy and disks and they need A: backing up and B: storing somewhere safe – your flat, heaven forbid, burns down and you’re left with nothing (Unless you’re using an ioSafe, right Rhonda?) you could even get a caddy like THIS one and you’d have (If you bought 4 disks) 4tb of space on hand… BUT, you have to BACK THAT UP!
So – what have we learned today? Disks die, expensive disks STILL die, the more disks you have, the more backups you need to run. Tomorrow we decide on a solution and build on that solution to suit our needs.
Sime
hi Sime!
I am actually thinking of going to the cloud!!!!
The prices are still a little bit high and the time to backup is really really long, but lately I have been looking at rackspace cloud files (http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/files) and the pricing is better than many others around and they have their own backup system. Still I have to admit that the uploading process is something not great yet!
Carlo
‘I have a theory on hard drives, they’re either dying or dead’
haha… nicely put
Yeah, creating backups is a real headache, I’ve been thinking more and more about using online backups as well as external hard drives… but its not cheap!!!
what are your thoughts on online backup?
You are backing up your backups?
As I mentioned on twitter, I am going through the same thing, my HTPC needs a back up and I am temporarily without an office, so my servers, which were all raid 1 are now in storage and I have exhumed their drives and need enclosures for them.
My approach is raid 1 for sem important stuff, raid 5 for the very important stuff. I transfer all my image dumps of the card onto raid 1, then do my edits. When I am at the stage of filing the images away, I do an edit on the whole lot to weed out the really useless stuff, flash tests, back focussed rubbish and where my imense photographic skills (:P) were out performed by my imense lack of photographic skills and I got a ‘grannies holiday snap’. These I dump, yes I dump, delete delete delete. Some say you shold keep it all, I have several large 200+ dvd books of image back ups that are mostly full of crap and large metal containers of slides that are mostly crap. I rarely go back to them, so why keep them. Keep the good stuff or useable stuff and trim the crap.
Once I have trimmed by latest set, I then transfer these to the raid 5 and breath…
However this was the setup when I had three servers on the go, now I have to find enclosure and run this from home. So I started testing enclosures, a 2 bay Edgestore DAS200 as the raid 1 option. Generally well made but mis-aligned drive screw slots and no inclusion of an eSATA cable, did not impress. But it does accept 3Gb drives. Next a 4bay raid 5 option. I think this needs to be NAS enabled, which limits the choices.
Good luck with the storage headache, rememebr it’s like your home/wage, no matter how large you will always fill/use it all, but mostly with/on crap!
If i were in your shoes I would go buy myself a Drobo 2nd Generation (4 Bay FW800 & USB 2.0 Storage Array) with DroboShare, it’s not going to be cheap though at between 5 and 6 hundred of your english pounds this solution might be out of reach for most home users.
A couple of things I like most about the drobo is you can put 4 1.5tb or 4x2tb drives in to start and will allow replacement as bigger drives hit the market, still not enough space? add another drobo array to a single drobo share to add more storage.
4 x 1.5tb drives will give you 4.1tb for data as 1.4tb is used in raid with 5.6gb overhead.
You can mix and match drives to get you started if you need to so that could save you a few quid if you already have some drives laying around.
Fault monitoring on the drobo is done at block level and no mention of SMART (an unreliable method of monitoring the health of drives) Instead they are constantly self monitoring the disks at block level using their own algorithms to ensure safety of your data, and the Drobo also has a battery backed NVRam to protect your data from power issues and failing drives.
The droboshare is an add on device and is pretty cool, it runs on linux and allows sharing of your array(s) with Mac, Windows and Unix as a network share.
Hope this helps
Rob
Man I hear you… I just keep buying more drives, not the best solution but what else can you do? There needs to be a good online solution for backing up – I found a few but they are either way expensive or else more for backup not archiving. /sigh. Looked at Drobo but I can’t afford it right now.
.-= Jason´s last blog ..Lex Justice & Ras•Pect =-.
I’m having a similar dilemma (though on a far smaller scale!)
I usually average around 4gb/200-ish images per three songs. Currently everything first of all gets dumped on the internal 320Gb on the Mac, the crap weeded out, edited, then all remaining RAW files transferred to a 500Gb firewire external drive, backed up to another 500Gb firewire drive (each currently with around 60Gb free). The ‘best’ stuff is also copied to a 120Gb USB external drive.
All the drives are different ages, and I’m also getting to the ‘I’m sure something’s going to die pretty soon’ stage. Next buys will be internal and external 1TB drives (am also leaning towards Caviar) – expense wise, buying cheap-ish extra drives is the only viable option at the moment.