[toni-a]

For the third time I am outraged to the point I  am seriously considering forgetting about photography.

The first tome during the warin 1991  my parents house was burnt and all negatives and prints just disappeared, I was so sad I quit photography till 2004 when I decided to go back, all was good till in 2009 a hard drive with most of my pictures failed, ever since I stopped enjoying photography and was shooting only occasionally stopped, buying lenses and gear.

One month ago I started logging in here and taking picture, to discover that  once again one backup hard drive with 500GB of pictures failed.

I know all the bla bla never keep a single copy etc (in fact I had two copies one on the computed and one in the backup when the computer hard drive failed I went to backup to discover it had failed too)

Hard drives seem a very bad choice for keeping data, what alternatives would you suggest, imagine all the pictures you have taken in four years just disappeared.

What do you do to safely keep your pictures?

 

[popo]

Of the source files, I keep them each on two hard disks. To me, there isn't another cost effective solution. DVDs, Blu-Ray, are all too small that I'd need an unmanageable number of them. Even with hard disks I need many TB worth, twice. To keep things simple, I just have two normal copies on different physical disks, not in the same computer. I don't use anything like raid 5 as that to me starts increasing risk once again.

 

I also kinda pre-emptively run around the risk of hard disks dying with old age. Since capacities continually increase, I tend to upgrade them every few years too. As backup disks don't get much power on time, they're less likely to die anyway. At some point I want to move to something like ZFS to prevent bit rot also, but to me the risk of that is low enough I'm not actively looking at it.

 

To be really paranoid, and for best practice, I should have a 3rd copy off site. At the moment I don't have any plans for that.

 

If people have a small enough data set, cloud storage may be effective.

[H. J. Simpson]

Got ZFS Raid Z (that's how level 5 is called with that file system) on one machine and it's automatically mirrored on regular basis over lan to another machine which also has ZFS (but not RAIDed). Both systems have unbuffered ECC memory, partitions are = 4 TB. Never ever had a problem with any of my files.

[Klaus]

As mentioned before - just get a RAID drive (Minimum RAID 5, better RAID 1).

A single drive failure will not be an issue anymore then.

RAID 5 can recover a single drive failure although it requires a certain intelligence in the drive controller.

RAID 1 is mirroring - which is simple (simple is always beautiful).

Admittedly I also have just RAID 5 though. :-)

 

There are sophisticated solutions such as ROBO (I have one) but honestly I think this is nonsense. Go for a solution that suits your needs for 3 years and then buy a new one (and then migrate all your data).

"Upgradable" drives such as the DROBO just get outdated over the years.

[Guest]

I tried a DROBO; it kept failing (not the discs but the electronics in the enclosure) so I gave it up as a bad joke. I may just have been unlucky, but there seem to be reports of others...

 

I now use two four drive 8TB RAID enclosures at different sites, each formatted as 4TB RAID1

 

The most cost effective solution is to buy a 4 enclosure bay, and look around for a good price for four 2TB drives to put in it...

 

Or of course LaCie and others will sell you the box ready to go.

[JJ_SO]

So far, I made it nearly 10 years without RAID. Problem with RAID is, if the controller fails and you don't have a second one  exactly the same type, you're in trouble again.

 

I keep it simple.

 

1 external drive on a firewire- connection for instant backups each time after importing photos.

2 external discs and a HD dock for less frequent backups once a week and after that more or less safely stored in a drawer.

 

I was looking on that 4 bay drive, too. I don't think I'll get one: drives should always be formatted in that bay, I'm afraid you can't put drives in without formatting them. You can't dismount a single HD, always the complete 4 HD bay and that seems unnecessary to me. Also, I'm suspicious: A single dock with FW800, S-ATA and USB 3 costs 65% of the 4 bay dock which is only USB 3. To me it appears too cheap to be good, but I can be wrong.

 

By the way , Toni-A: One backup is not enough. HDs will fail. It's not the question "if they fail", only question is "when". Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

[popo]

I never bothered with raid 5 or similar as that is only useful on a single box. I used to use raid 1, but again that is in a single box. Now I manually sync two copies with drives in two different systems.

 

If you want a low cost PC to house hard disks, look out of the HP microserver range. There is one model that has been on sale here for quite a while I picked up for £110 after cashback, and has 4 SATA bays. In a quick look I think they have finally got rid of them and the few around are ~£200 now. I liked it mainly as it is a small box and has 4 easily accessible drive bays, not hot swappable.

[Brightcolours]

I just use 2 external USB hard drives which I manually sync periodically. 2.5' HDs seem to fail less often than 3.5" ones, so one of them is 2.5".

 

I must say that I use Macs, with HFS+. I had file system corruption in the past (that seems a thing of the past with HFS+ by the way), but could bring back the file structure and the files later. And I have had several external HD case electronics fail, but has not lost a single file yet.

 

As stated above, I do not want a RAID solution either, as their main vulnerability is their electronics failing.

[Sylvain]

Toni,

 

A word of warning about RAID. As someone mentioned here, the implementations are often controller dependent. 

 

Also beware that a RAID rebuild might be costly in time. Exposing your data to further risks and to high disk activity for litterally days in some cases. RAID was way too much advertised as "easy" lately and it just isn't. People will get drives that aren't made for it, ... the controller implementation is bad/poor... so you can end up with a LOT of data that becomes unmanageable.

 

Actually, after having played myself with RAID 6 now for a year, getting a UPS for it etc, ... I realize RAID should be seen more as a solution to keep a system running (none of short return to operation, with live data set) than a solution to keep data over a long time. Regardless of the highest chosen level of redundancy & error control.

Never forget that a UPS and a RAID 6 on 5 disks with 2 disk failure redundancy will do nothing against fire, flood, theft, ... It gets to the point private people over invest (I did) in this while the solution remains the good old 101 : duplicate over different "state" & "places" : HD, CD/DVD/Tapes(haha), ... AND the cloud.

 

I'm surprised nobody mentionned the "cloud" ?

 

My current strategy is this :

1-SD card will hold data as long as it can.

2-SD card content is copied on the NAS storage-RAID.

3-NAS storage is synchronized with Amazon Web Services - "Glacier" (consider Google, ...). I'm not bothered by "amazon will steal ownership of my photos". It's not the case.  It costs me $6 a month (600 GB of data). Beware of the invoicing system. The more you want this system to be available(which absolutely isn't the point of it), the more you pay.

 

Data has to be at least on 1+2 or 2+3 and often is 1+2+3.

 

There are a lot of cloud solutions around, some of them actually run on Amazon.

 

In short toni-a,

I'd get a simple external harddrive, something like twin drive 2x4TB in mirroring (RAID 1), another 4TB you keep elsewhere (or vice versa) and a Cloud subscription somewhere. And then discipline, discipline, discipline...

[Klaus]

Cloud is fine ... IF you have sufficient UPLOAD bandwidth.

In my case this is currently totally prohibitive for instance.

Your mileage may vary, of course.