External hard drive

[Girevik]

I'm thinking about looking into getting an external hard drive for backing up my photos and was wondering if anyone here had any recomendations on what kind to get. I'm assuming they're very straightforward to use and easy to switch from one computer to another.

[ohenry]

I have a Seagate that has worked just fine for me for 2 years. USB or Firewire support.

[Sidebyte]

Suggestion, I owned and operated a computer store for 5 years and have every brand of hard drive fail at one time or another. If you have important images that you don't want to risk the loss I suggest you use some of the new "solid state" hardrive devices, I see some available up to 6 gigbytes now. In lieu of solid state, consider a tape drive, holds a lot of info and not expensive. External hard drives and CDROM disks can fail within a year or so. I have "burned" CDROM's that are useless now in just 2 years. Home burned CDROMS will fail in a relatively short time due to separation of the layers, commercial CDROM's like Microsoft originals are pressed, not burned in a totally different process, that's why they last.

[Girevik]

Originally Posted by Sidebyte

I owned and operated a computer store for 5 years and have every brand of hard drive fail at one time or another.

Understood, that's why I'm looking into a backup drive. I would have my images on both my PC's drive and whatever backup solution I decide on. While neither one is garanteed to last forever, the odds of them both crashing at the same time are pretty slim.

The solid state solution is probably a good one, but an expensive one. I'm looking for something to backup all of my images, not the the (very, very few) good ones. I'd have to think I'd fill up even a 6GB device fairly quickly, and they tend to be very expensive. I was looking at the hard drives because a device with more space than I would likely ever fill can be had for less than $100.

[JDArt]

AMS makes fine external enclosures. I suggest you buy one of these and then fit it with the hard drive of your choice.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...o.x=10&Go.y=33

[jfrancho]

That is the type of external HDD I use. I have quite a few drives that I slap in there. The thing to remember is that this is just one part of the backup/archive strategy. The fact the HDD's fail shouldn't deter you from using them in a redundancy model.

[Girevik]

Originally Posted by JDArt

AMS makes fine external enclosures. I suggest you buy one of these and then fit it with the hard drive of your choice.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...o.x=10&Go.y=33

cool - I'd not seen those before. I assume that rather than being "plug'n'play" you need to install some software on whatever computer you'll be using it with, right?

Originally Posted by jfrancho

That is the type of external HDD I use. I have quite a few drives that I slap in there. The thing to remember is that this is just one part of the backup/archive strategy. The fact the HDD's fail shouldn't deter you from using them in a redundancy model.

What other strategies should also be used? I would have thought having them on two hard drives would be suffient, unless you wanted some kind of off site backup in the case of some natural disaster or something.

[JDArt]

Originally Posted by jfrancho

The fact the HDD's fail shouldn't deter you from using them in a redundancy model.

That's right. In fact, the speed advantage of hard drives over optical disks or tape is so pronounced that I would rather make two backup copies to hard drives than suffer the pain and agony of having to back up to tape or DVDs.

[JDArt]

Originally Posted by Girevik

cool - I'd not seen those before. I assume that rather than being "plug'n'play" you need to install some software on whatever computer you'll be using it with, right?

No. Both the USB-based and Firewire-based drive enclosures require no driver in an XP configuration. I have to say that although USB is slower than Firewire, I have had less trouble with reliability of connection with USB. Sometimes for no reason with Firewire and XP, the drive just gets dropped off the system. I've had this experience with multiple computers, too, so it's not particular to one PC.

[jfrancho]

What other strategies should also be used? I would have thought having them on two hard drives would be sufficient, unless you wanted some kind of off site backup in the case of some natural disaster or something.

I have two main "groups" of images: an archive collection, and a working collection. My local data drives are mirrored via RAID1, therefore there are two copies of whatever I have on my PC, which includes both the archive and working collection. There is another copy of the archives (on a hard drive) in my firesafe. This directory is also copied to an off site server. The archive only changes state when I add to it, so maintaining backups of it is easy - just make duplicate the data to all locations when you add to it. The working collection changes state almost daily. I do a complete backup of this to an internal dive and the off site server once a week. I also do an incremental backup to the internal drive nightly. Assuming all backups do not fail, The worst that can happen is loss of a days work. If the internal backup fails, then I lose a week. I have a relatively complex model born out designing disaster recovery and business continuity models at work. The drives that stay in the firesafe are made with a device similar to what JD posted. My working datadrives in my PC are 2x300GB SATA drives setup as RAID1. The internal backup is just a 500 GB EIDE drive. The external drives in the firesafe are a pair of 160 GB drives. I'll be adding four more 500GB drives sometime this spring.

For you, I'd say an external drive kept in a save place away from PC, would be a great start. I'd copy my data files to it every couple of nights, or as needed when you make important changes.

[Girevik]

Originally Posted by JDArt

AMS makes fine external enclosures. I suggest you buy one of these and then fit it with the hard drive of your choice.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...o.x=10&Go.y=33

Okay, here's a dumb question (I know - there are no dumb questions, only dumb people). I see they make the cases in 2.5", 3.5", and 5.25". In browsing around looking at hard drives, a lot of them don't even specify what size they are. Would a 2.5" drive fit in a 5.25" enclosure, or would the pins not line up (I've never had to worry about it when putting a drive into a computer - as long as you have the right rails you're fine).

[Kevin Barrett]

Hard-drives are so cheap now, a multiple drive strategy makes good economic sense. The speed advantage of hard-drives over other media equates to
a better likelihood of backing up period.

I recently bought a 200GB Maxtor drive from Staples on 'black' friday for $19.98 and then purchased a USB enclosure for $29 from CompUSA.
Pretty cheap solution for less than $50. In retrospect, I should've bought more.

Kevin

[JDArt]

Originally Posted by Girevik

Okay, here's a dumb question (I know - there are no dumb questions, only dumb people). I see they make the cases in 2.5", 3.5", and 5.25". In browsing around looking at hard drives, a lot of them don't even specify what size they are. Would a 2.5" drive fit in a 5.25" enclosure, or would the pins not line up (I've never had to worry about it when putting a drive into a computer - as long as you have the right rails you're fine).

You need a 3.5" hard drive for a 3.5" hard drive enclosure. Same for 2.5" (notebook hard drive). Pay attention to drive interface as well: SATA vs IDE. The drive interface has to match the case's. Easy as pie once you figure things out.

Kevin's right: drives are cheap these days. The problem is not getting them; it's figuring out where to put them all once you do. There are only so many drives that will fit in a computer case, and having a bunch of external units gets unwieldy as well.

[Sidebyte]

Originally Posted by JDArt

That's right. In fact, the speed advantage of hard drives over optical disks or tape is so pronounced that I would rather make two backup copies to hard drives than suffer the pain and agony of having to back up to tape or DVDs.

For years in my office I had an automatic tape backup system that came on at midnight.* That way "SLOW" isn't a factor.* Saved all of my files daily and never failed in 6 years that I used it.
Now I have an external case and a scsi hard drive and just plug the scsi cable into the back of the PC into the scsi card and download rapidly.

[jfrancho]

Tape backups are really nice for rotating off site backups, but it isn't really that practical for most home users. Keeping track of the tapes, and actually performing a restore can be a complicated task for a casual PC user. If you are running a small business and using anything close to a N-tier system, tape backup with automated backup software is going to be the easiest solution. For the casual home user, having the files on a hard drive represents a familiar, and well known way to access and restore any lost files.

[brian.austin]

Backup systems are a compromise between cost and convenience. Tape systems offer little in the way of convenience, other than automated scheduling, which can be done with hard drive systems as well. They are bulky, require media management, are prone to failures (which you'll never know about until it's time to restore, even with verifies) and slow to both backup and restore.

External, single drive systems offer reasonable reliability, speed and convenience at a lower cost. Quite frankly, any name brand will be fine. Quality and production techniques have raised the bar across the industry for hard drives. Yes, you'll still see failures but not nearly on par with what it used to be like. Since it's a BACKUP solution and not primary storage, it's statistically unlikely that BOTH your PC and external hard drive would go down at the same time UNLESS there is a fire, natural disaster or theft. Plan for those by using CD's or DVD's and storing them offsite. Or, like I do, simply have TWO external hard drives and swap them out (I use a safety deposit box).

The best option costs the most, of course: RAID 1 or 5 (or 10 or 1-0 or whatever flavor your manufacturer of choice names it). RAID systems offer redundant disks within the enclosure. If one drive goes down, a copy of the data is available on other drive(s), depending on RAID configuration.

Avoid RAID 0 (striping) since it's designed for speed and not redundancy. The drive enclosures may support RAID configs but the cheaper ones don't. In fact, it's not even a true RAID 0 system and uses proprietary local protocols to store files on the enclosed hard drives.

What does this mean? In the event of a hard drive failure inside the cheaper drive enclosures, regardless of how many drives are installed, you've just lost the ENTIRE data store. There is no recovery from what I've read. RAID systems and single drive systems offer recovery options (albeit expensive but it's possible).

Personally, I'd just go with a single drive system and swap them out. If you've got a few bucks, buy or build a RAID 1/5/10 system for true internal redundancy.

[Girevik]

Most of my shots are snapshots of the kids. I hardy think I've got anything worthy of a multiple-redundancy system is called for. Now I'm just debating between an external drive and the enclosure. I'm kind of leaning twoards the enclosure because that WOULD make it cheaper to have a couple of different drives for a double backup system of some kind.

[jfrancho]

That's the route I went.

[Sidebyte]

Originally Posted by jfrancho

Tape backups are really nice for rotating off site backups, but it isn't really that practical for most home users. Keeping track of the tapes, and actually performing a restore can be a complicated task for a casual PC user. If you are running a small business and using anything close to a N-tier system, tape backup with automated backup software is going to be the easiest solution. For the casual home user, having the files on a hard drive represents a familiar, and well known way to access and restore any lost files.

And then you place the files from the hard drive on tape.

[Mark McCall]

Originally Posted by Sidebyte

Home burned CDROMS will fail in a relatively short time due to separation of the layers, commercial CDROM's like Microsoft originals are pressed, not burned in a totally different process, that's why they last.

If your CD's are failing, there's something seriously wrong.
I have hundreds of thousands of CD & DVD backups from our years shooting digital.
I've yet to be unable to open any of them, even the older generic ones without the protective coating over the aluminum data layer.

Storage atmosphere is important.
Paper or Tyvek sleeves or hard cases all provide excellent protection.
Keep them out of untraviolet light.