Your backup strategy

[JDArt]

Has your strategy for backing up your digital images changed over the past six months or so?

[CAClark]

Six months ago, everything resided on one solitary hard drive.

My setup now consists as follows (recapped from the other thread):

Main PC has internal 300gb drive.

External USB2 drives: 2x200gb and 1x160gb

Removable HD in main machine: 300gb

They work as follows. All acquired downloads such as purchased software & updates etc... and ALL photo (RAW & processed) on internal C drive. All my CG artwork assets on 1st 200gb external drive.

I then use software app to mirror the first external drive to the second 300gb external (all CG assets). The phots and downloads from C drive are mirrored to the external 160GB drive.

All vital data (CG assets, softwares & photos) are also mirrored to the removeable 300gb drive, and I take that away to work every day.

essentially it means that my livelyhood (CG) and photos etc... exist in 3 places (3 spereate hard drives), inc 1 copy kept seperate from the PC to protect against burglary or fire loss.

Cheers!

[dc2]

Anything important I burn to cd and dvd I also put on an external hard drive
at wedddings as soon as possible I back up cards on my epson p2000 [love this gadget great viewer as well]

[Paul Shields]

Originally Posted by JDArt

Has your strategy for backing up your digital images changed over the past six months or so?

Nope, I still don't have one... What I have been doing recently is deleting a large percentage of images. You know, the ones that are just not good enough or too close to ones that are. I'd rather have 100 pics that are nice to look at than 1000 that are similar but not quite there, so it doesn't bother me to be so ruthless. In fact, it's quite uplifting .

I've finally got my new PC sorted out now with 0.5TB of available storage, so I'll use that as a dumping ground until I come up with a better strategy. Unfortunately, I suspect the 'better strategy' will be to create an even bigger dumping ground once this storage is filled up...

[NeoDude]

Likewise 6 months ago all my images resided on one drive. Now every week my pc automatically backs up my whole "My Documents" folder including photos to a mirrored RAID array of 2 500GB drives in a file server located in my loft.

[ohenry]

I use a program called SmartSyncPro that automatically backs up files and directories to an external drive. All this is done in the background. It's pretty much a no-brainer (which is perfect for me )

[Shelbell82]

Right now I am just using CDs, but I am having a computer built that will fit all my photo needs w/ 2 separate internal hard drives.

[cedric_r]

Keyword is "redundancy". I have my images downloaded onto my workstation from CF card. Then all photos are copied to server 1 where a 320GB disk is reserved for photos. Then at night the disk is synchronised with another 320GB disk in server 2. Occasionally, I dump the new photos onto DVD, but I don't trust their durability.

[Paul Shields]

Right - this thread has prodded me into doing something about the mess that is currently my backup 'strategy'. It's now quite reliable, quick - and most of all, free! For anyone that's interested, here's how mine works:

I have a linux box in the basement that's been there for years running mail and for streaming movies etc. I've now added a 300GB drive to another 300GB drive that was already installed. They have been grouped together in a logical volume for a total of 600GB. The PC's on which I do my photo editing, music writing, etc have an rsync daemon installed.

This daemon advertises specific parts of the file system - e.g. 'My Documents'. A cron job on the linux box runs a simple script that performs an rsync of the file system on the advertised hosts. This runs every hour. Thus (after the first run, which obviously takes a while) it is very quick as it just does incremental copies since the last run. Rsync is very fast and stable and I'd recommend it as an option for anyone who's looking for a simple and free solution. You don't need a Linux/Unix/Mac OSX host for this - rsync, via cygwin, can also run on Windows quite easily.

[JDArt]

Key to a successful backup strategy is a successful restore strategy. Any backup system that relies upon proprietary software may or may not make things difficult if you need to restore something but no longer use or have the backup software that created the backup.

I'm a firm believer in uncompressed backups of original files, except for ghosting.

[cedric_r]

Originally Posted by Paul

This daemon advertises specific parts of the file system - e.g. 'My Documents'. A cron job on the linux box runs a simple script that performs an rsync of the file system on the advertised hosts. This runs every hour. Thus (after the first run, which obviously takes a while) it is very quick as it just does incremental copies since the last run. Rsync is very fast and stable and I'd recommend it as an option for anyone who's looking for a simple and free solution. You don't need a Linux/Unix/Mac OSX host for this - rsync, via cygwin, can also run on Windows quite easily.

I also use rsync for all copies, set to never delete. But it's easier because I run Linux only.

[mbanstendig]

I use Macs.

I have had four, count em, four hard drive failures in less than a year. One USB-2 Big Disk came new messing up my system and went back. One few year old LaCie 75GB went bad and they said to trash it, nothing could be done. Two Fantom FW drives have messed up: one wouldn't show anymore on the desktop and caused problems with my system. It is being repaired. The other has bad blocks.....since they are only in one photo file, i am just saving that drive as a backup for the photos on it that can be read, but may zero all data and try to rescue the drive for a spare. But I don't trust it, or any other Fantom drive any more......that drive caused almost a week of mess until I finally found out what was messing up my backups, with TechTool/Micromat tech support's help. It took days to run the surface scans and tests to find out the problem.

While doing this, a Firewire 800 replacement truned out way more than twice as fast as the other firewire drives, so my present scheme is four LaCie tripple interface Big Disks, 3 500GB and one 600GB. One for photos one for Scans and the other two as backup for those two. My much smaller-sized text work disc files and my USER are backed up onto a 300GB Seagate Fireiwre/USB, and they have plenty of room.

NOTHING I GENERATE EVER GETS SAVED ONTO MY MAIN HARD DISK, except my mail, which I cannot make Apple's "Mail" ap save elsewhere, hence my "user" backup.

Otherwise, my internal boot drive is not backed up and contains only applications that I can replace from disc or download any time, mwhich is much better than rebuilding from backups, especially if the aps or system have been upgraded. That can become a huge mess. If the main drive goes, I can't use anything. So nothing I generate is ever saved to the boot drive if i can help it. I learned that in the mid 80s, when my Apple Mac went down and everything stopped cold for a week, during repair, even though we had other computers that could have been used. Never again.

With PCs, I would go nuts. Apple evidently has the copyrights on the natural, logical ways to do and organize things. And I find the PC illogical and nutty.

Mark

[D2x_user]

My images are stored within an external HD via Aperture. I have 2 external HD's that are backup vaults for these images. I also burn DVD's of the most important images and store them off site. I plan on getting a safety deposit box at my bank to add a third 'vault' backup, just in case the others fail.

[Blinky]

I look over my right shoulder... sometimes I use the mirror just to see how well I can do. :P