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image backup

W

[wizard]

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 30, 2001
Messages
376
my wife is a photographer and it seems to be an ongoing problem of keeping her files safely backed up and permanently backed up.

i'm weighing the ideas between building a larger raid array or NAS box, or using online storage. the problem i see with online storage is i still need the space available locally.

have any of you gone though this type of research before?
 
Set up a RAID1 array on her computer for her to store stuff on. Make a cheap WHS box and set it to automatically backup her computer. Use an external drive to backup the WHS (weekly, whatever) and take it offsite somehwere (work, safe deposit box, etc). Can't get much safer than that.

I don't understand your problem with online storage though? For images it would be pretty much ideal, relatively small files.
 
I am a professional photographer, and just rebuilt my entire storage system to deal with future expansion. It is actually similar to the suggestion in the post above.

I have a main WHS that stores all of my files. I have a second WHS on site that is not plugged in except for once weekly backups of my primary WHS. I also use tray mounted drives to take vital data off-site once weekly. When images are being worked on they are also located on my workstation, which is backed up by the primary WHS. Changes are then copied throughout the system when the client project is closed out and the file is taken off of my workstaiton. With the two servers and the tray drives I currently have about 12TB of total storage space, and am very happy that it is secure.

With drives as cheap as they are, I dont ever want to tell a bride that I lost a single photograph, let alone all of her 30GB of images when hard drives are $0.09 a gig. Online storage was not something I even looked at with terabytes of data. I don't like RAID 1, so I wouldn't use it, but that is up to you. Just dont think that RAID is backup (the above poster didn't say it was, but it is worth saying).
 
Yeah the RAID1 was just a suggestion to prevent downtime in case of a failure. It's pretty rough to lose your working directory or current project due to a single faulty drive.
 
I can get behind RAID 1 for that. I have just seen too many people who think they are covered by it as a backup. As well, I have only ever had to deal with drive failures a few times. I typically replace drives long before they would hit MTBF to keep up with speed and density.

Before I broke things out I have 5TB in my workstation plus backups outside. I transitioned to a Vertex and a Velociraptor in my workstation and could not be happier with how it runs (fast).
 
My wife is a photographer too and I'll 3rd the WHS route. Easily expandable and has redundancy. I have several 2.5" drives that I rotate off-site as backups in case of fire/water/theft.
 
I am just curious how big your storage needs are? Or rather how much bandwidth they would represent?

Would a service like Carbonite, Mozy, IDrive etc work for you? (it's been great for a few small businesses and regular user friends of mine)
 
My suggestion would be to use all 3 if the files are that important:

Onsite - Windows Home Server with duplication on for the photos and other important data
Offsite - Copies of important files such as images, documents at work, relatives house or safe deposit box. Could use internal drives, external drives or dvds. Your preference but if it were me I would have two external drives and keep them at work or my parents house where they could be rotated bi-weekly for backups.
Online - use a personal website or service such as carbonite, dropbox, etc.
 
Online backups would be wonderful to be able to use, but for almost all of the photographers I know it is simply not practical. I know that when shooting a wedding, it is about average for me to come back with 30-40GB of data from a single day of shooting. With a new camera, that would bump up to 60GB per shoot.

I love the idea of online backup, but it would kill me to try to upload any of that.
 
jfkriege said:
Online backups would be wonderful to be able to use, but for almost all of the photographers I know it is simply not practical. I know that when shooting a wedding, it is about average for me to come back with 30-40GB of data from a single day of shooting. With a new camera, that would bump up to 60GB per shoot.

I love the idea of online backup, but it would kill me to try to upload any of that.
Click to expand...

Not necessarily.. It would just take a long time. You'd have a utility that would run in the background and upload the content while you are away from the PC. Price might become an issue, some of them offer unlimited space for a fixed amount, however that is for "home use" and they might not consider your use as home, rather as business.
 
jfkriege said:
Online backups would be wonderful to be able to use, but for almost all of the photographers I know it is simply not practical. I know that when shooting a wedding, it is about average for me to come back with 30-40GB of data from a single day of shooting. With a new camera, that would bump up to 60GB per shoot.

I love the idea of online backup, but it would kill me to try to upload any of that.
Click to expand...

But its like you said, you would hate to have to tell a bride that everything is gone. I know it's a far-fetched scenario but entire computers can die and take out everything on them, houses can burn down, etc.

I don't know what the costs are with Amazon Web Services but they have a thing where you send your external hard drive to them through UPS or FedEx and they load it to the server. It could be costly but it depends on how much your data is worth.
 
I already have three copies on site and another off site. If they all get destroyed in a day, then the giant meteor got me too, or it was meant to be.

At this point, if I really needed more security, I would start trading server space with friends in other states and just mail hard drives back and forth. Uploading 30-40 GB a week is too much for my current connection. My estimate is that it would take 4-5 days, after getting caught up with the terabytes of data that I have.

Have any of you dealt with any of Comcast's business class services? If there was a better connection, it would not be too hard to queue up vital data. I would lov eto hear people's thoughts.
 
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