Yes, believe it or not there are people still out there that don't backup their computers on a regular basis and I suppose there always will be those people. It typically only takes one hard drive crash and the loss of important files and time to make someone backup their computer. As I've always said, "there are those who have lost data or those who are about to lose data – backup!" With all the digital photos and video you're taking, it's even more important than ever. With film cameras, you could at least go back to the negatives (to a point). Now with everything being digital, the file you import from your camera/card IS THE NEGATIVE! That's all you have. So let's say you do backup regularly. There are still some other considerations. Let's start off with the various categories of data storage and my workflow.
My working copy – There is always "current" data on my computer. My main, everyday computer is a Macbook Pro and whatever I'm currently working on is usually on the internal drive of that computer (if it's an intense video project, then it's on my Mac Pro). For the sake of example, let's say I just did a photo shoot at the studio. This means that I shot directly to my computer via tethering into Lightroom 3. The RAW .NEF files are sitting on my internal drive. Before I leave the studio, I plug in an external Firewire 800 drive and copy the folder for that shoot. This is just a temporary backup for the trip home. Yes, I'm that paranoid and don't want to lose the whole day due to a weird problem or crash between point A & B. Once I get home, I convert the .NEF files into .DNG files right in Lightroom and pitch the .NEFs. I also begin my Selection and Rejection process. The rejects go to the trash too. At this point I have a gallery for the client that I post online and they make their selections. This process can take a few days before they get back to me, and usually within an hour my MacBook Pro is backed up over my network via Time Machine. So now I have a 3rd copy of the photos. I do whatever is necessary (retouching in Photoshop CS5) to get the final images ready and they are delivered. Once everyone is happy. I move the images to the next location.
My network file server – this is a dedicated Mac mini (running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Server) with a Drobo connected to it for mass storage. I'm using just under 1.5TB's of space on my Drobo and therefore it can be backed up onto an external 1.5 TB Firewire 800 hard drive. Yes, I backup my Drobo because while the Drobo is great at protecting you from drive failure, it does nothing to protect you against data corruption or accidental file deletion. My Drobo is backed up every night automatically via SuperDuper! to the external drive.
Archiving – this is the grey area for me. My idea of a archive is a set of files that you're done with. The client is happy, you've been paid and are under no contractual obligation (or the date has past) to hang on to these files. You don't really need them, but you just don't want to delete them "just in case." For me, I put these kinds of files on misc. external hard drives that may be lying around and I don't worry about them (no I don't trust/like DVDs for long term storage). The reason is, in over 20 years I've yet to have to load up a file from an archive. So I'm not too worried about these files and I'm keeping them just because I have the extra drives around the office. I've had a couple of archive drives die on me and I didn't flinch. I couldn't even remember what was on them and really didn't care. Of course your needs may be different and you may need to hold on to this data. I guess for me if it's important, then it's still on my file server above.
Off Site Storage – Now we get to the point of the post and that is "what's your offsite backup strategy?" For me, it's rotating those 1.5TB drives (I have two identical backup drives) that backup my server, to my safe deposit box at the bank. Most people just don't believe that a disaster will strike their perfect homes/offices. You'll never be robbed because of where you live and the tornado, flood, fire, hurricane, etc. always happens to the other guy. Um, ok! So be it! Then do me a favor. Have an offsite backup if for no other reason, than to have more than one backup of your "important" files. While it's rare that both your main drive AND your backup drive will fail at the same time, it's not too rare that a virus or other malware can infect them both. After all they are all connected to the same computer right?
What about online storage? I think the online backup services are good. I don't really use one for the simple reason that it would take forever to backup and restore 1.5TB's of data online. It takes about a day to do it via Firewire. How many days would it take to do it over the internet? What I look to online storage and backup for is to backup smaller "in progress" projects.
So what's your offsite backup strategy?
I’ve recently discovered Backblaze for my cloud storage. $5/month for unlimited storage on a single drive (My Drobo attached storage is technically defined as a single drive.
The constant bugaboo of online or cloud storage is always the length of time it takes to get that initial copy done to the cloud. While mine took a while (30-45 days) initially, it’s just a trickle upload once the initial push is done. Some services like Carbonite offer drives that are fedexed back and forth to help expedite the initial push. I wish Backblaze did this, but for the price, it worked for me:
http://www.backblaze.com
You are absolutely right about offsite storage. I recently lost my hard drive on my 2 year old iMac 24″ computer. I was able to download all of my key files from SugarSynch which is my offsite storage provider. Everything worked perfectly.
Interesting side note. I took my iMac to the local Apple store (yes, I bought AppleCare) and instead of replacing the hard drive, they gave me a brand new iMac 27″ computer. I am almost glad that the hard drive died!
Len, the reason they gave you a new one is that replacing the hard drive in an iMac is an exercise that takes the better part of 2 hours and requires suction cups to lift the glass and the LCD out of their frames. Apple BURIED the hard drive as deep into the guts of the iMacs as it was possible to go, so it just makes sense to swap it out and send off the old one for depot repair…if they even bother repairing it.
i am the person you refer to who did not do a backup. last month my internal hard drive failed un expectedly. it cost me thousands of dollars for a special service to rebuild the hard drive in order to recover all my files. and i was never sure they would succeed until they did. it was a horrible experience they could have been easily avoided by doing a regular backup. do not do what i did.
When I complete a shoot, I first start by backing up the CF card to my iPad. I love the simplistic approach and I can let the process run on my way back from the location or in my hotel room. I now have 2 copies of my shots. If I am on the road, the files are again transferred from the CF cards to my laptop. If I am not rapidly filling up my CF cards I’ll usually leave the images on them and switch to a fresh card for the next shoot. The only time this can be an issue is when I’m shooting an airshow where I might have a few thousand images initially (you have to shoot in CH to get the best possible shot, IMO.) So now I have the shots in at least 3 places. If I’m returning home from a shoot, the images are transferred to my QNAP NAP/Server. I love this box; it has it’s own IP address on my network and is located out of the way in the study closet where I have my media/network center. My model has two drive bays with 1.5TBs in each. The second drive is an exact mirror of the primary (I don’t care for RAID) and performs an incremental backup each night. Again, 3 copies of the files. I have my entire photography biz on this drive so I put digital copies of the contracts, model releases and so forth on here as well. I too use my safety deposit box for offsite storage. I have several left over hard drives that I place into a Thermaltake BlackX Duet to which I copy my server drive over to. One drive remains at the bank at all times. I simply update a second drive with the most current backup and replace the one at the bank.
My internal drive is used for the OpSys and programs; I do incremental back ups locally to my Drobo on a weekly basis. External backup is kept in a safe deposit box.
My Drobo also has all my data; I back it up using MozyHome as my cloud solution. Agree with Jason that the initial backup can take a long time (but who cares as it’s done in the background). 2GB for free, and that suits my needs currently.
I’m thinking of adding my internal drive backup, which is on the Drobo, to MozyHome as well to eliminate the safe deposit box offsite solution.
For long-term archival, I use a combination of DVDs/external HDs.
I use Carbonite (an on line.backup that I can access files from anywhere) for my main backup. I also backup daily to an external hard drive at home using a program called Casper. Photos are backed up immediately to the iPad. I Aldo back up data files monthly to an external hard drive that goes to work with my wife.
My offsite backup is two external hard drives. One sits next to my Drobo and gets backed up daily. The other lives at my friend’s house, and I swap those two every week or so (more often if I’m working on a big project). One note, if you’re using hard drives for long-term storage, fire them up every once in a while–if unused for too long, they might die.
Thank God for backups. Last week my two external Hard Drives both crashed with in hours of one another. 350+ gigs of photos gone. So I went to backblase and sure enough everything was there. 3 choices to get the data back, by down load, by cd,or by external hard drive(they sell it to you with all your data.) My choice was to use my time capsule and restore everything to a brand new external HD, secure in the knowledge that I still had Backblaze as my fail safe.
If you are on a MAC check out http://www.backblaze.com
TG
I just got a Drobo and I am using that as my main storage. I also have a Time Capsule and TimeMachine. It is in a separate room from my iMac and Drobo as a little added protection against a localized fire, water damage or theft (the theif may get the iMac and Drobo out but may overlook the Time Capsule. I am thinking of backing up my Drobo to an external drive but have not done that yet. I also use back blaze for cloud backup.
I use one called safecopy backup.Safecopy is cheap because for only 50bucks a year i have got 200GB of space and inaddition my free unlimited 3GB trial version was upgraded to 5GB.
The has saved me from spending tons of money.The recovery process here is just by a few clicks because they keep deleted files forever.
This has kept my files secure and if my computer or hard drives crashes,am on a safe side with my files backedup on safecopy online backup.
I have 2 e-SATA 1TB external hard drives I use for backups. One is called “Archive” and the other is a mirror of the “Archive”. I store all my media from photography (DNG, JPG outputs,etc), videos, MP3s, etc on the archive drive along with selected directories and folders from Windows which get backed up to the drive. I use Microsofts free SyncToy for my mirroring and backup routines. So all my data is on my PC and mirrored on 2 external E-SATA drives.
For off site storage, I just recently started using Carbonite for $55 a year. Although Carbonite does not support “external or attached” hard drives, it does detect E-SATA drives as “internal” since they connect to the same SATA ports as any other internal hard drive.
The only downside to this, is that it takes about 3 months of 24/7 backup routine to get the 750GB or so of my data backed up to Carbonite (I have a 4.0/1.0 commercial cable account). However, once this is completed it won’t be an issue as it only backups new and changed files and removes any deletes.
I do hope to add a Drobo to my setup at some point in the not too distant future though. I’d love to have it set up as a NAS.
My primary archive is on my workstation, but gets synctoy copied to the ReadyNAS Pro whenever I finish processing a shoot. The same goes for my wife’s photos(I handle the techside of it for her). About once a month to once a quarter depending on how active we’ve been shooting, I will copy the photo directorys off the NAS onto a large external drive and bring it to work and leave it here. Since I work 400 miles from where I live, that gives me a good bit of geographical displacement, even though I’m still in an earthquake zone(Just about all of AK is in one way or another).
My biggest problem currently is that i’m approaching the limit of what I can do with a single external drive for backup…they need to hurry up with the 3TB drives.
I use SuperDuper! for backing up of my entire iMac drive. The backups are on two LaCie external Quadra Firewire 800 drives. All drives are .5TB. One drive is always off site at a friends house. The other is next to the iMac. A weekly backup is done and the drive is taken to the off site storage and swapped. All three drives are never in the same place. When the older backup arrives home, SuperDuper! is run upon arrival and as stated above run again upon departure. I love that SuperDuper! has one button backup. I plug in the firewire, turn on the drive’s power switch to “Auto” and SuperDuper! recognizes that I have added a backup drive. It automatically launches, does an incremental backup, ejects the drive and quits. The drive itself then turns off because it is in Auto mode. Nothing could be simpler. My photo’s are automatically backed up to a separate LaCie Little Disk during import into Lightroom 3 using Lightroom’s automatic backup-during-import feature. This drive stays home with the iMac since the other drives also have the photo’s included in the incremental backup. My memory cards usually stay loaded until the incremental backup is done. I’ve abandoned Time Machine since the constant drive usage was annoying me and it filled up the .5TB drive in a month and a half. Once I had an off site component to my backup strategy I felt that my backup solution was much more complete. If you do not have a redundant off site strategy would your data be safe if your home was destroyed?
Side note using SuperDuper! I configure my external drives to be bootable. This has saved my bacon when I needed to run disk utility from another drive to fix my local drive. Being able to boot from another drive using the option key is genius on Apple’s part.
Well I guess I need to think about what to use for an off-site back up. I’m fairly small time right now but I do have a My World Book backing up my computer. But that’s all. And I’m not even sure I’ve got that working properly? I bought it at a Best Buy so I’m wondering if I could call their “Geek Squad” to come help me? Initially the instructions for the WD were easy then it went right over my head and I’ve got no idea what they’re talking about. It I don’t have a lot of data right now so I’m thinking an online site would work for my off-site needs.
Great article Terry! Thanks for re-lighting the fire up under me to get my backups secure!
I’m a backup fiend. I have time machine, SD copy of volumes, and I use Crash Plan for offsite backup at my brothers house. Why Crash plan, because I loaded the original data at home and then shipped the drive to my brothers. This process eliminated the long initial upload time, and now just the updates happen on-line. If I need to do a mass restore, my brother will ship me the disk.
daily copies to 2nd drive inside machine.
weekly copies to external local hdd.
monthly copies to external remote hdd.
That’s my method. I need to streamline, and maybe take out the extreme redundancy, heh. I thought about buying a drobo or similar, but it just doesn’t seem worth it for me yet. I can get away with just buying external 1TB drives for now. When my growth exceeds the rate of HDD space increases, I’ll get a drobo.
I back up on ingestion into two back up drives and one working copy with Image Ingester Pro. My working files are backed up nightly to an attached drive, with a copy drive taken each week off site and rotated. I move my archived files (either originals that are put away as is or derivatives that are worked on) to a separate JBOD attached to my server computer. I copy the hard drives there to back up hard drives, and put them in a fire safe case and take it to my office off site that has a sprinkler and alarm system. I figure it has a good chance of surviving a fire. I make Bluray copies of the archive when transferred so they survive disk failure or viruses. The JBOD has 5 bays, and each computer has a bay to put in a drive without having to open the case.
I have started using CrashPlan for my online/external backups:
http://b4.crashplan.com/landing/index.html
A personal cloud might prove to be even more useful.
Waiting for PogoPlug to debut in Australia:
http://www.pogoplug.com/
Still find my .Mac (MobileME) account useful for web photos.
I have a primary internal hard drive that contains only my OS and installed applications. I back up an image to my external hard drive. That way if my hard drive fails or anything goes wrong, I can just restore the image. No need to reinstall OS or my many applications.
I also have a secondary internal hard drive which contains only my data files. I back this up to the same external hard drive. I also back up this drive up using Carbonite.
With my backup strategy I feel very confident that my data will not be lost not only because of the redundancy, but also because it would be highly unlikely that all 3 will of my back ups would fail all at the same time.
I am very surprised that you still do not use an online back up service. Im sure its a bit of a hassle to back up everything via external hard drives and having to go to your safety deposit box.
Here is my blog post detailing Carbonite and my back up strategy.
http://www.simpleist.com/2007/01/online-backup-carbonite.html
I use ZenOK Online Backup (an on line.backup that I can access files from anywhere) for my main backup. I also backup daily to an external hard drive at home using a program called Casper. Photos are backed up immediately (onlinebackup.zenok.com/)