Backup External Drives

RoryW

I know this has probably been asked before but given that technology and options change so quickly I thought I would ask the question again

I use my laptop for my photos and with 11gb of disk space left I am rapidly approaching a storage problem

What I am thinking of at present, subject to comments received, is :

1. Bite the bullet and buy two external drives

2. Move all photos from Laptop to the external drives

3. From now on upload and store all photos on the two external drive so when uploading to Lightroom, photos are automatically backed up

4. Only store a few favourite photos on the laptop rather than everything

I remember looking at the Drobo before and thought it looked interesting and available in Ireland and then maybe getting 2 of the Western Digital 1 TB External Drives @ €139.99 each

As there seem to be many IT people on this forum, any thoughts or suggestions or suggested links to look at welcomed

Thanks

Edit : Drobo cheaper here !

Borderfox

I use 4x 1tb drives (for work) and keep the bare minimum on the laptop.

RoryW

thanks, out of interest, what brand and does it make a difference ?

Deliverance XXV

Hard drives are so cheap at the moment you have no excuse!

Here's a external 1TB (1000GB) hard drive for €95

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=420463

You seriously CANT go wrong.

kjt

I use both of these western digital externals #1 & #2. Brilliant drives!

I also have 3 internal drives, two maxtors and one WD. I think it's an 800gb WD drive on the laptop. Syncback is a great program for syncing/backing up folders or drives. I've been using this for over a year and couldn't do without it!

A low scale NAS set up may be handy. Its very independant and with Raid1 you get automatic backup of your files.

Something like this should do you: http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage/terastation/terastation-duo/

Raid1 means that you install two identical disk drives and everytime you save to one it automatically saves to the other one as well, so if a disk drive fails you loose nothing. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks]

Other advantage is with a small bit of effort you can get full access to your storage on the fly so if you are out you can send to or pull files from the NAS. I have a somewhat similar (thought not NAS) setup going.

Pangea

Get this one mate, i bought it ,as a back up ,its a smart hard drive.
I got mine for 103 euro
its 116 now ,Dabs.ie is trustworthy.
http://www.dabs.ie/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4XZQ&SearchType=1&SearchTerms=external+hard+drive&PageMode=3&SearchKey=All&SearchMode=All&NavigationKey=50473

It was actualy 60 pounds in comet store in england ,but its only store collection ,gone back up to 80 or so now.

sheesh

one thing I would say is this: Decide if you want one that just runs off the usb plug or if it is ok for it to require an external power source If you never plan on moving the computer and have plenty of plugs an externally powered on is the best.

Western digital is a reliable brand as is Lacie

kgiller

I use Western Digital external drives too. I have 4 of them, and have never had any trouble with any of them. Fast and reliable storage, and they are pretty cheap nowadays. If i were you, id get the 1TB WD one. Thats all you need, you dont need 2

stcstc

Raid is not a Backup scheme, its a system for fault tollerance.

BUT

it not to be relied upon to protect your data, particularly these cheaper NAS boxes, as if something fails its very hard to recover.

RoryW

kgiller wrote: »

I use Western Digital external drives too. ...... id get the 1TB WD one. Thats all you need, you dont need 2

if you get only one you have no backup them if you use this as your main drive for storage ?

Creamy Goodness

My ideal setup would be 2x1 TB drives in RAID 1 (I always forget the raid numbers which one is the disk mirror one? That's what I'd use) in a NAS box and then a 500GB USB2.0 powered portable drive for on the go with it transferring back to the RAID on a daily basis

democrates

On a related note, I've recently reorganised my image folders:
I've a folder for each camera body, and within each one I've got folders for originals, edits(various versions for photos for points in post process), and exports (within exports I've folders for customers and pix.ie etc. containing final versions).

It's an improvement on what I had before but others probably have better ways to organise.

Deliverance XXV

democrates wrote: »

On a related note, I've recently reorganised my image folders:
I've a folder for each camera body, and within each one I've got folders for originals, edits(various versions for photos for points in post process), and exports (within exports I've folders for customers and pix.ie etc. containing final versions).

It's an improvement on what I had before but others probably have better ways to organise.

You are far far more organised than me.

stcstc

stcstc wrote: »

Raid is not a Backup scheme, its a system for fault tollerance.

BUT

it not to be relied upon to protect your data, particularly these cheaper NAS boxes, as if something fails its very hard to recover.

Raid1 is - it just mirrors a disk.

Other raid systems are a pain to recover from because of the way it saves to the disk but with Raid1 you just have two identical disks with no Raidbands.

nilhg

Just a couple of quick points

Don't confuse your working data and backup, since Rory has Lightroom I'll refer to it. You have two things to consider, your image files and the the Lightroom database and previews.
The database and previews will be the data most often accessed as you use the program, so they are the most important to have fast access to, therefore i would always like to have them on the actual computer. The images will be read into memory as you open them, (not browse, the previews are used for that) so having them on a USB2 drive directly connected to the computer wont cause much of a slowdown, though it might be worth keeping the current months shots on the actual PC.

For back up you also need to consider both the images and the catalogue/previews/presets. How you go about it is up to your circumstances, USB2 drives are a good option as long as you dont use the one you are using for your working set.

NAS is a great solution, as long as you feel your self competent to set it up properly, I have 2 units, a DNS323 and a NSLU2 both of which I have found very reliable. Both of these run Linux and a working knowledge of users/groups and file permissions is a great help when setting them up. One big worry I have about them (especially the NSLU2) is that the drives are formatted using the EXT filesystem so if the unit dies, the drives are not (easily) readable on a windows PC.

Don't forget to try to keep a reasonably upto date backup of all your data offsite as well, fires and floods do happen.

coylemj

If the external drive is going to be simply a backup drive i.e. you'll always have the primary copy on the laptop then a single hard drive like the 1TB WD will do. However if you're going to offload the data to the external drive in order to clear space on the laptop then you need to pay attention to resilience since a single hard drive (external or internal) can crash and you lose all your data.

RAID-1 (also known as mirroring) involves an even number of drives, say 2 x 1TB. This will look like a 1TB drive to your laptop but every time you write data to it, the same data will be written to both drives. Thus you can survive a disk crash but at the expense of only getting 50% usable vs. raw capcity i.e you have 1TB usable for 2TB actual capacity.

You can achieve RAID-1 mirroring either by buying a solution where it's implemented inside the box, or by using software which writes the same data to two separate drives. The s/w solution is less elegant but significantly cheaper.

There's also RAID-5 (parity) where you have three or more drives and you get to use the effective capacity of n-1 drives but you can survive a single drive crash. This means that whereas with RAID-1 you only get to see 50% of the capacity, in a three drive RAID-5 system you get to use 66% and in a four drive system it's 75%.

There's another option out there which you need to avoid at all costs and that's where two disks are bundled in a box and you get to see the whole capacity. These are sold as performance solutions since the data is striped over the two disks (RAID-0) and claims are made for superior performance but they are an accident waiting to happen because if either disk fails, you're dead. What this means is that if someone is trying to sell you a 1TB solution in a box with two drives, you need to make sure that it has 2 x 1TB (RAID-1) which delivers exceptional resilience or RAID-0 (2 x 500GB) which delivers inferior resilience since the chances of failure are double that of a single 1TB drives.

coylemj

coylemj wrote: »

There's another option out there which you need to avoid at all costs and that's where two disks are bundled in a box and you get to see the whole capacity. These are sold as performance solutions since the data is striped over the two disks (RAID-0) and claims are made for superior performance but they are an accident waiting to happen because if either disk fails, you're dead. What this means is that if someone is trying to sell you a 1TB solution in a box with two drives, you need to make sure that it has 2 x 1TB (RAID-1) which delivers exceptional resilience or RAID-0 (2 x 500GB) which delivers inferior resilience since the chances of failure are double that of a single 1TB drives.

Excellent post! Just to clarify, if you have two disks going in Raid0 and one disk fails, you don't loose half of your files, what you loose is essentially half of the data stored in each file! Effectively both drives are then useless and its tricky and expensive to get Raid disk data recovered. So it really is bad way of backing up.

nilhg

coylemj wrote: »

If the external drive is going to be simply a backup drive i.e. you'll always have the primary copy on the laptop then a single hard drive like the 1TB WD will do. However if you're going to offload the data to the external drive in order to clear space on the laptop then you need to pay attention to resilience since a single hard drive (external or internal) can crash and you lose all your data.

RAID-1 (also known as mirroring) involves an even number of drives, say 2 x 1TB. This will look like a 1TB drive to your laptop but every time you write data to it, the same data will be written to both drives. Thus you can survive a disk crash but at the expense of only getting 50% usable vs. raw capcity i.e you have 1TB usable for 2TB actual capacity.

You can achieve RAID-1 mirroring either by buying a solution where it's implemented inside the box, or by using software which writes the same data to two separate drives. The s/w solution is less elegant but significantly cheaper.

There's also RAID-5 (parity) where you have three or more drives and you get to use the effective capacity of n-1 drives but you can survive a single drive crash. This means that whereas with RAID-1 you only get to see 50% of the capacity, in a three drive RAID-5 system you get to use 66% and in a four drive system it's 75%.

There's another option out there which you need to avoid at all costs and that's where two disks are bundled in a box and you get to see the whole capacity. These are sold as performance solutions since the data is striped over the two disks (RAID-0) and claims are made for superior performance but they are an accident waiting to happen because if either disk fails, you're dead. What this means is that if someone is trying to sell you a 1TB solution in a box with two drives, you need to make sure that it has 2 x 1TB (RAID-1) which delivers exceptional resilience or RAID-0 (2 x 500GB) which delivers inferior resilience since the chances of failure are double that of a single 1TB drives.

I'm not aware of many USB2 raid devices out there (drobo maybe) and would be slow to trust everything to the one device, to many disasters waiting to happen for that.

Two USB2 drives (one for working, one for offsite) and a NAS is a pretty reliable setup it seems to me, one you are careful about actually running the backup.

BTW, Lightroom has an option to back up copies of files to an extra storage device as its importing them.

rymus

Got one of the new model Drobo's recently (usb2 & firewire 800) and it's the business. Stuck 2 x 1tb drives into it and it did all the formatting and necessary setup for me.

Don't get me wrong, I know all about raid, it's setup, practical applications and all that boring stuff. I know what the drobo is doing is raid, but it's doing it all for me. I'm going to stick in another couple of 500gb drives in the near future and it'll format them and bring them into the storage pool without me having to do anything except whacking the drives into the available slots.

I do take the point that raid isn't a backup. It's redundancy. Moved about 260gb over from a maxtor external hard drive that needed maxtor specific drives. Drobo will take anything with a sata interface. Don't have to worry about getting a drive of a certain speed, cache, make or model.

Some people say it's expensive for what's essentially an external hard drive caddy but once you know what it does, it's well worth the money.

I got mine of a guy on ebay in the UK when the sterling was bad. Bound to be a bit more expensive now that it's recovered a bit.

coylemj

Ok but when you get up to a four drive system you'd really need to consider a unit that supports RAID-5. In a four drive (4 x 1TB) system this will give you 3TB usable vs. 2TB in a RAID-1 system so you'll have 50% more usable capacity, not to be sneezed at.

rymus

quite right... but a drobo will change the raid level depending on how many drives you have in.. right now, because I've got two drives in there, it's mirroring. When I stick in another one or two, it'll go raid 5.. Or at least it's version of raid 5. So I'd still get the 2.7 or 2.8tb of usable space with 4 x 1tb.

RoryW

..enters

...reads replies

..goes to dig out "double dutch" dictionary...!

...exits

ThOnda

Well, Lightroom BackUps... Don't get me wrong but working with physical files in LightRoom is the most demanding task I had to do with any software in last few years.
I am depressed and I gave up. If it crashed, I am doomed.
I would like to achieve:
Catalog on internal HDD (C:), photos on External HDD (W:), backup of the Catalog also on W: and copy of pictures and catalog on another External HDD (X:).
So far, I have catalog on X:, photos on W: (moved from X:) and backup of photos on X:.
Please, don't tell me that I am so stupid not to be able to change location of catalog.

I know, it is slightly off topic, but I would like to get also your opinion on back ups and using HDDs both internal and External.

And Rory, External 1TB WD is less than €100.00, you cannot go wrong with that at least for backing up all your work.

Shiny

I notice that nobody has mentioned that USB 3 is coming out this year.

If I were getting something like a Drobo, I would be waiting for them
to adopt that interface and get an express card for your laptop for a
seriously fast connection with your external drive.

RoryW

RoryW wrote: »

..enters

...reads replies

..goes to dig out "double dutch" dictionary...!

...exits

NAS - Network attached storage.

Its basically a small computer with 2-4 hard disks, ie a machine with the sole job storing information.

RAID - is a system of controlling hard disks. Raid1 means that you have two hard disks which are the same size. However, your computer only sees 1 - but each time you save a file to the one that your computer sees, then the RAID controller copies the file onto the second disk. So each time you save a file you are saving it twice over two disks.

Raid0 - BAAADD! Just don't go there!

If you have a wireless router like the NTL or Eircom one you can just plug the NAS box into it and then your laptop or desktop can connect in. Not hard to set up at all, just requires working knowledge of the english language! If you want to go fancy you can set it up so that you can access your NAS box over the internet. Its not that hard to do to be honest.

This is a more complex system then just buying extra hardisks but a much more complete system. In the long run, I think it would be easier as well as you can't really 'loose' a NAS box.

rymus

Shiny wrote: »

IIf I were getting something like a Drobo, I would be waiting for them
to adopt that interface and get an express card for your laptop for a
seriously fast connection with your external drive.

Yeah, but that's not taking into account the length of time that a manufacturer like drobo will take to adopt the new interface.. They've only just brought out a firewire 800 version. Still, it'd be a nice option.

coylemj

rymus wrote: »

quite right... but a drobo will change the raid level depending on how many drives you have in.. right now, because I've got two drives in there, it's mirroring. When I stick in another one or two, it'll go raid 5.. Or at least it's version of raid 5. So I'd still get the 2.7 or 2.8tb of usable space with 4 x 1tb.

Now you're talking, can you give me that model number of the unit that can do that please. That' exactly what I need, something that dynamically adapt RAID levels based on the number of drives.

nilhg

Nice and all as Drobos (and other similar units) are, they still represent a single point of failure, if its power supply fails you can't just pop a drive out of one, slide it into a HDD enclosure and read the data.

You still need some back up.

rymus

coylemj wrote: »

Now you're talking, can you give me that model number of the unit that can do that please. That' exactly what I need, something that dynamically adapt RAID levels based on the number of drives.

Don't know what the model no is, but they only make two specs. One (older gen) has only usb 2. Newer unit has usb 2 & firewire 800. Can't mix them up

Dink

Really wish I understood this sort of thing.....

But unfortunatly it's a lot of 'whooooosssssshhhhh'

Maybe one day...

coylemj

nilhg wrote: »

Nice and all as Drobos (and other similar units) are, they still represent a single point of failure, if its power supply fails you can't just pop a drive out of one, slide it into a HDD enclosure and read the data.

You still need some back up.

If you're a major corporation then you can invest in multiple power supplies, remote mirroring and everything that money can buy, we're talking here about people with limited budgets.

We all know that the power unit is a single point of failure but if the power unit fails you don't lose your data, you just get it repaired and you're back in business, same as getting a puncture in a tyre, not the end of the world. How many power units do you have in your washing machine, TV, microwave...?

The single hard drive in a desktop or laptop represents a single point of failure with potentially catastrophic consequences if it crashes for the vast majority of users - all we're talking about here is a reasonable priced solution to maintain a second copy of data, let's keep it within reason and trim our cloth to our measure.

Shiny

nilhg wrote: »

Nice and all as Drobos (and other similar units) are, they still represent a single point of failure, if its power supply fails you can't just pop a drive out of one, slide it into a HDD enclosure and read the data.

You still need some back up.

The exact same can be said for Raid 0/5 arrays where if the controller
dies, it usually has to be replaced with the exact same controller.

Not sure about RAID 1, as it is merely a copy of both drives.

Unfortunately RAID, is not standardised (in terms of interoperability).

I used to think Raid5 was the way to go but after reading horror stories
about the controller dying, I'm afraid now.


Wouldn't a Raid1 based external drive be the safest ?

I have linked as much as possible to explain the different levels

coylemj

Shiny wrote: »

Wouldn't a Raid1 based external drive be the safest ?

I have worked in IT for almost 30 years and I can say for certain that RAID-5 gives just as good resilience as RAID-1. The attraction in the commercial environment of RAID-1 is performance, not resilience; if drive 1 is busy when you go to read data, you can send the read request to drive 2 instead because the two drives are identical so you reduce wait time and improve performance.

In a document called 'Exposing Mirroring vs. RAID-5 Myths' in 2000, this is what Gartner said about RAID-1 (mirroring) vs. RAID-5, 'MTBF' stands for 'Mean Time Between Failure' and is an estimate as to how long a device will last before it fails......

Both mirroring and RAID-5 protect against data losses caused by disk failures. At a practical level, there is no significant difference between the levels of protection offered by these two schemes. This is because the underlying reliability of disks is so good and subsystem repair time so short.

For a RAID storage subsystem to lose data, it must have two disks in a mirrored pair or RAID group fail within hours of each other. With disks delivering MTBFs that are measured in hundreds of thousands of hours, the effective MTBF of a mirrored pair or RAID group is almost infinite.

Q.E.D.

coylemj

coylemj wrote: »

If you're a major corporation then you can invest in multiple power supplies, remote mirroring and everything that money can buy, we're talking here about people with limited budgets.

We all know that the power unit is a single point of failure but if the power unit fails you don't lose your data, you just get it repaired and you're back in business, same as getting a puncture in a tyre, not the end of the world. How many power units do you have in your washing machine, TV, microwave...?

The single hard drive in a desktop or laptop represents a single point of failure with potentially catastrophic consequences if it crashes for the vast majority of users - all we're talking about here is a reasonable priced solution to maintain a second copy of data, let's keep it within reason and trim our cloth to our measure.

Simple NAS setup will sort out most of the pro photographers needs.

Costs a bit more then just buying external drives but its compact and resilient.

Shiny

coylemj wrote: »

I have worked in IT for almost 30 years and I can say for certain that RAID-5 gives just as good resilience as RAID-1.

That's all well and good if you are talking about disk failure.
(My first sentence mentioned controller failure).

As a result of this I suggested that raid 1 would be the safest as
you could use one of the drives by itself without a controller.
I don't know this for sure but you can probably shed some light on this?

Raid 5 is basically raid 0 with parity. None of the drives on their
own are usable.

Basically I wouldn't rely on Raid 5 on its own whereas raid 1 I would,
assuming my assumption, from earlier is possible.

nilhg

coylemj wrote: »

If you're a major corporation then you can invest in multiple power supplies, remote mirroring and everything that money can buy, we're talking here about people with limited budgets.

We all know that the power unit is a single point of failure but if the power unit fails you don't lose your data, you just get it repaired and you're back in business, same as getting a puncture in a tyre, not the end of the world. How many power units do you have in your washing machine, TV, microwave...?

The single hard drive in a desktop or laptop represents a single point of failure with potentially catastrophic consequences if it crashes for the vast majority of users - all we're talking about here is a reasonable priced solution to maintain a second copy of data, let's keep it within reason and trim our cloth to our measure.

But the OP asked about moving his image files off his laptop on to an external drive, the drobo would be perfect for this (but quite expensive) but he would still have only one copy. If the unit fails he is without it till it's repaired, if its stolen or destroyed in a fire or flood then everything is gone.

A USB2 disk with a copy of with vital data on it, offsite or even in the boot of the car is not an unreasonable precaution.

Deleted User wrote: »

Simple NAS setup will sort out most of the pro photographers needs.

Costs a bit more then just buying external drives but its compact and resilient.

For backup I'd agree but to use as your main image store could be a tad slow, unless you have gigabit ethernet.

WheresMyCamera?

And here was me thinking I could just go out and buy a HD and bang a load of photos onto it.

nilhg

nilhg wrote: »

For backup I'd agree but to use as your main image store could be a tad slow, unless you have gigabit ethernet.

We are discussing back up right?
But when people are using 1tb disk setup you should really be getting some form of NAS or a Server type box for backup. Otherwise just gets messy.

AnCatDubh

I had posted about this topic before somewhere and I'm still sitting on the fence but like the OP it's beginning to get more critical for me having moved 60gigs off my laptop and onto a smallish external hard drive.

I know it can be done - getting your raid setup sorted / mini towers of space etc... but still when your house burns down (please God no) - your files are vulnerable and would be destroyed. I don't like the sound of that. Also, after a few years i'm sure you'll replace your setup so you are into recurring capital investment. Yes storage capacity grows who'd of thought a terrabyte for a little over €100?

As I posted previously, i'm still really interested in online offerings. I don't care if my uploads take all night to run - i'll be sleeping anyhow. My problem here is that now every time I pick up the camera, i'm uploading 5 - 10 gigs of RAW images which is obviously eating disk space. That would also eat into storeage plans

putplace.com (Irish) for example (at time of writing) are charging €40 for 20Gig storage for a year - that equates to about 3 active photoshoots for me given the size of the RAW files and the fact that i'm falling in love with burst mode. 80Gig will cost me €100 - meh, there's me Terrabyte hard drive paid for.

$50 a year gets me carbonite which will allow me back up as much as I have online. That's great but someone previously posted a fear of doubt in my head - what happens if they aint around. I contacted them at the time and got the standard answer of how wonderful a company they were etc..., problem is if they have the only copy of your images then you'd be up the creak really.

Automated back ups with both the above solutions.

Hmnnn..... will need to think again. Having images in one place worries me. Having a second backup in the same physical location as the original also worries me.

Perhaps a hybrid is the way to go - a mad big disk or array or SAN if that's your cup of tea and carbonite as an off site strategy.

ThOnda

You can always get another External HDD and leave it in some other place - office, parents' house... and bring it in on regular (e.g. monthly) basis to do the update.
By the way, no hints about LR2?

AnCatDubh

AnCatDubh wrote: »

I had posted about this topic before somewhere and I'm still sitting on the fence but like the OP it's beginning to get more critical for me having moved 60gigs off my laptop and onto a smallish external hard drive.

I know it can be done - getting your raid setup sorted / mini towers of space etc... but still when your house burns down (please God no) - your files are vulnerable and would be destroyed. I don't like the sound of that. Also, after a few years i'm sure you'll replace your setup so you are into recurring capital investment. Yes storage capacity grows who'd of thought a terrabyte for a little over €100?

As I posted previously, i'm still really interested in online offerings. I don't care if my uploads take all night to run - i'll be sleeping anyhow. My problem here is that now every time I pick up the camera, i'm uploading 5 - 10 gigs of RAW images which is obviously eating disk space. That would also eat into storeage plans

putplace.com (Irish) for example (at time of writing) are charging €40 for 20Gig storage for a year - that equates to about 3 active photoshoots for me given the size of the RAW files and the fact that i'm falling in love with burst mode. 80Gig will cost me €100 - meh, there's me Terrabyte hard drive paid for.

$50 a year gets me carbonite which will allow me back up as much as I have online. That's great but someone previously posted a fear of doubt in my head - what happens if they aint around. I contacted them at the time and got the standard answer of how wonderful a company they were etc..., problem is if they have the only copy of your images then you'd be up the creak really.

Automated back ups with both the above solutions.

Hmnnn..... will need to think again. Having images in one place worries me. Having a second backup in the same physical location as the original also worries me.

Perhaps a hybrid is the way to go - a mad big disk or array or SAN if that's your cup of tea and carbonite as an off site strategy.

Buy hosting somewhere (its dirt cheap!)
Get your NAS or whatnot to rsync to it weekly.

For the layperson: that is where your storage device copies all recent files to a folder on the net.

nilhg

ThOnda wrote: »

Well, Lightroom BackUps... Don't get me wrong but working with physical files in LightRoom is the most demanding task I had to do with any software in last few years.
I am depressed and I gave up. If it crashed, I am doomed.
I would like to achieve:
Catalog on internal HDD (C:), photos on External HDD (W:), backup of the Catalog also on W: and copy of pictures and catalog on another External HDD (X:).
So far, I have catalog on X:, photos on W: (moved from X:) and backup of photos on X:.
Please, don't tell me that I am so stupid not to be able to change location of catalog.

ThOnda wrote: »

By the way, no hints about LR2?

If you want to change the location of the catalog, drag it to its new location using windows explorer (back it up first) then either double click on it, or press the ctrl key as you double click on the LR short cut on your desktop, and use the browse button to locate it.

nilhg

Deleted User wrote: »

Buy hosting somewhere (its dirt cheap!)
Get your NAS or whatnot to rsync to it weekly.

I hope you'll be about to do the howto on that.;)

There are plenty around - it really isn't hard to do!

Backup is scalable, you make it as complicated as you want and a NAS type solution is overkill for a lot of people when you can just go out and buy some external drives.

But I would say, if you are using 1tb plus for backup, then you need a proper system and not just some disks lying around the place.

coylemj

The problem with remote backup is that the amount of data that needs to be backed up increases at a faster rate than network speeds so for the past 10-15 years it has always been a business proposition that was on the verge of being viable but never quite made it.

Programs like rsync mean thay only modified files are backed up each time its run.

Plus thanks to ssh you can tell your system to back up whenever you want. Once its running you don't have sit there and watch it!

charybdis

nilhg wrote: »

I hope you'll be about to do the howto on that.;)

rsync -avP ~/Photographs/ example.com:~/backup/Photographs

But really, any hosting company offering 50Gb+ storage for a practical price probably isn't all that reliable and not worth trusting as your only backup, although it's better than nothing.

Amazon S3 is also an option, but it doesn't support SSH so things built on top of SSH (like rsync) won't work either. You can sort of do the same thing with Jungle Disk, but it's not the same.

Realistically though, I don't think we have the network infrastructure to make regular multi-gigabyte uploads practical.

feileacan

iomega are now doing a 2Tb (2x1Tb) external hard drive for €207 (including vat), not sure how much delivery is.

http://www.iomega-europe.com/section?SID=fd0f40b5207eb8889b1ca8d95fe0b132073:4725&secid=76612

back software wise, i use Allway Sync on the pc (cant recommend this software enough) and chronosync on the mac

coylemj

feileacan wrote: »

iomega are now doing a 2Tb (2x1Tb) external hard drive for €207 (including vat), not sure how much delivery is.

http://www.iomega-europe.com/section?SID=fd0f40b5207eb8889b1ca8d95fe0b132073:4725&secid=76612

This type of solution is an accident waiting to happen, if you see JBOD (just a bunch of disks) or there is no mention of mirroring or RAID-1 then avoid like the plague. Putting two disks back to back in a single system is asking for trouble.

Here's the maths:

Say on a given day the chances of an individual disk failing is one in a thousand. In a mirrored (RAID-1) system you have two disks (2 x 1TB) and you can see 1TB usable. You can only suffer data loss if both disks fail and the chances of that happening is one in a million (1/1000*1/1000) so you can feel pretty safe.

In a RAID-0 (JBOD) system you will suffer data loss if either disk fails and the chances of this happening is 1/500 (2/1000) meaning that the RAID-1 system is two thousand times more reliable. The chances of failure is doubled from 1/000 to roughly 2/1000. If you're into probability the chances of both disks not failing is ((999/1000)*(999/1000)) which is 0.998001 or roughly 499/500.

rymus

using rsync is all well and good.. but what if you're shooting RAW and have 200GB+ of photos on your external storage.. And you don't have the money to pay for 100mbit ftth.