back ups

RoryW

as most photos nowadays are stored on computers, I was wondering how often people back up their computers or just the photos on the computer in case of hard disk failure

thebaz

flickr is my backup -- worth the price of going pro , but slow to upload

Borderfox

5 x 500gb and 1 x 750gb with all commercial work also on 2 x dvd hard copies. Waiting for a trial with a company called putplace for offsite storage.

RoryW

Borderfox wrote: »

5 x 500gb and 1 x 750gb .

that is alot of photos...

Paulw

I have 1 internal 300GB disk (main disk), 1 external 250GB disk, and 1 external 500GB disk. I backup to the external disks once a month, or if I'm out a few times, then once every 2 weeks. I also have 1 x 120GB disk that is used 4 times a year, and stored off-site (I keep it in work).

Ruu_Old

External storage is so cheap that you might as well store it there as backup for a start anyway.

rahtkennades

Just remember that an external hard drive still plugged into and sitting beside your computer is still liable to most electrical and mechanical faults your internal one is!

Mantel

rahtkennades wrote: »

Just remember that an external hard drive still plugged into and sitting beside your computer is still liable to most electrical and mechanical faults your internal one is!

With the added risk of falling off your PC/desk Just don't pack it in styrofoam like a work collegue tried to do once, then you add melting on to the list

rymus

at the moment working on a 2 x 500GB raid1 external drive, but will be investing in a 4 x 500gb raid5 nas unit within the year I'd say. the raid1 drive is filling up quicker than expected.

10-10-20

Guys - out of interest, how do you backup?

(It's my speciality subject!)

Roen

You can back up directly from Adobe Bridge 2 on to Iron Mountain storage. It's quite handy but I have no idea how much it costs and of course it will be dog slow to upload all those huge files.

Personally I burn to dvd and create a ghost image of my photographs folder as well.
Will look into the whole raid thing at some stage seeing as we should be getting 48Tb of storage in here soon.

CraggyIslander

Roen wrote: »

Will look into the whole raid thing at some stage seeing as we should be getting 48Tb of storage in here soon.

48Tb? *Falls of his chair* wont you think of all the kittens!!!

Roen

Fred C. Dobbs wrote: »

48Tb? *Falls of his chair* wont you think of all the kittens!!!

It's a handy start

rymus

hmm.. that's terabytealicious! I thought I was going overboard with my max of 3TB

Paulw

10-10-20 wrote: »

Guys - out of interest, how do you backup?

Copy/paste of my directory structure.

My directories are - year/month/event

So, as a month passes, I know which directory needs to be copied.

Borderfox

4 of the 500gb are for work and each backs up the other. The 750gb is for personal stuff and this backs up with the 500gb also.

Muineach

backing up to dvd's is getting impossible for me
for the last 3 months I've clocked up 112gb of RAW + PSD files so if i need
to back them up (2 copies per disc) would take ~50 discs.
I looked at the dual layer drives but the discs are too expensive.
I have a lot of HD space on my computer but the are filled with games/movies etc., I was starting to think of a NAS system as well.

nilhg

Muineach wrote: »

I was starting to think of a NAS system as well.

I have both a linksys NSLU2 and a dlink DNS-323 on my network, both are fine with the linksys perhaps a little more stable. The big disadvantage of both is that they run linux and the disks are formatted using ext filesystem so you cant easily connect a disk directly to a windows computer.

It may be worth keeping an eye out for WHS devices, which should be hitting the shops soon.

oshead

It's all well and good backing up photos onto disks with multiple TBs and more of space. I generally keep a few copies in different locations (work, home external etc...).

I'd like to know what format you back them up in. This may not seem like a problem now. But, Whose to say these formats will have applications that will be able to read them in say 10 or 15 or even 25 years. I know there is a push to make Adobe's DNG format the widely accepted universal format of photo archiving. This will ensure there will always be applications that can read them.

Any toughts on this guys.

Dave OS