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Are you confident?

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VanA

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I just want to switch focus from our cameras & photo gear to an important topic.

Do you have reliable backups of your photos?

I have fellow photographers who download all of their images to their PC hard drive and that's it. No CDs/DVDs, auxilary or external hard drives. No nothing.

I, for one being in the IT industry know the importance of backups. Therefore, my backup consists of (besides the PC hard drive):

1. External hard drive (1) at home.
2. External hard drive (2) at a friend's house.
3. CDs

A total of 3 external backup copies and 1 internal copy in the PC.

So, what do you guys do for backups and are you confident with your method?
 
Besides my files on my computer, I have a backup on..
1. An external
2. Another desktop in the house
3. Another desktop outside of the house

I feel like i need to backup onto antoher external and keep it out of the house also...
 
VanA said:
I, for one being in the IT industry know the importance of backups.
Therefore, my backup consists of (besides the PC hard drive):

1. External hard drive (1) at home.
2. External hard drive (2) at a friend's house.
3. CDs

A total of 3 external backup copies and 1 internal copy in the PC.

So, what do you guys do for backups and are you confident with your
method?
Click to expand...
Although I mostly edit on my work computer (a Vista laptop PC) the final destination is my iMac, with Time Machine running backups every hour to an external harddrive.

Apart from that I keep a bunch of DVD-RW discs at another site.

Yeah, I feel fairly confident about the image storage. the weak part is the low frequency of updates to the DVDs, I guess, and the storage on my work PC while working with the images while being "on the road".

--
Regards,
Roger

 
external drives to mirror all my regular interna or external drives.
keep them at another house

hopefully never have the misfortune to have the main and backup HD both fail at exact same time pretty unlikely I think, although you never know)
VanA said:
I just want to switch focus from our cameras & photo gear to an
important topic.

Do you have reliable backups of your photos?

I have fellow photographers who download all of their images to their
PC hard drive and that's it. No CDs/DVDs, auxilary or external hard
drives. No nothing.

I, for one being in the IT industry know the importance of backups.
Therefore, my backup consists of (besides the PC hard drive):

1. External hard drive (1) at home.
2. External hard drive (2) at a friend's house.
3. CDs

A total of 3 external backup copies and 1 internal copy in the PC.

So, what do you guys do for backups and are you confident with your
method?
Click to expand...
--
http://skibum4.smugmug.com
(work in progress, a few galleries up, many more to come)
 
I have a backup on a file server in another room - and then an external HD backup of that. So, unless the house burns down or it all gets stolen, I'm OK.

Alan
 
I keep everything backed up on another computer, plus archival quality cd's, plus two external hard drives. The cd's and one external hard drive are then kept in a fire safe.

I figure the only way I will lose everything is in a nuclear blast, and at that point, I probably won't care.

Dennis
 
1. Main copy on PC.
2. Full backup on external HD.

3. Uploaded to smugmug site (however, I do not update as frequently as I should).
 
I archive my raws to two separate HDDs in my media server, then copy them to DVD and store those at the office. The finished photos are saved in jpg and stored on another two different drives plus one of the HDDs in the media server.

If I lose access to my photos, I know that I was meant to lose access to them.

-Suntan
 
...and it means that you have, at the very least, TWO isolated backup instances of all critical data AFTER you lose one via catastrophe or any other means.

Many of our images -- over 30,000 of them -- have been taken on world trips that we will never make again, and are therefore "priceless" to us. I value them as such, and have devised a data redundancy method that reflects that value. If my house burns to the ground or is taken up in a tornado I will still have two isolated instances of our data/images available at different locations, as well as a third backup in the form of DVDs secured in a fireproof, water-resistant safe bolted to my garage floor.

I sleep soundly at night knowing only Armageddon will jeopardize my data.

Brendan
=====
I am the last sane person on earth.
 
One copy on an internal hard drive, nightly backup to a USB-attached hard drive. Every 2 weeks or so I pull another hard drive out of our fire-proof safe and back up. I also burn two sets of DVD's when I get over 5GB of data - one goes in the safe and one goes to the in-laws 200 miles away. Plus the full-res JPEG images of my top 5GB or so on Smugmug. I'd like to have another HD that also goes off-site, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

Oh, and my 80GB PSD still isn't full, so my RAW's from when I purchased it are on yet another device.
 
I'm surprised--am I the only one doing this?

I have the images on my main machine, indexed. Then I back them up to a RAID-5 NAS. Finally, I upload the most important images to my dad's house (and bring them all in bulk when I visit 1-2x per year).

I thought about using CD/DVDs. Too expensive, too time-consuming, and where do you keep them? Besides, digital rot will get those in the end...
 
I once bought a external hd and started to back up all my image files, mostly raw. Then started making DVD copies also. Then procrastinated.

A couple months later I found that my Lacie external hd crashed. I now am living dangerously on the main hd of my iMac.

Thanks for reminding to get off my as^ ^%$!!!

--
I will never photograph a cockroach.
http://droppingin.smugmug.com/
 
An internal RAID 5 here.
I bet most people don't know what it is.
 
I'm a computer geek, so my solution was to get a 2TB NAS in a RAID-5 configuration, and then I set up my linux box to automatically sync my images folder on my Windows box with the NAS, so all I have to do is upload my pictures from my CF card and it automatically gets backed up.

You don't need to geek out like I did, though--if you get the BuffaloTec NAS, it comes with Windows software you can install on your Windows PC, and tell it where folder to monitor. Whenever you change files there, you get the same effect I do. The NAS is a tunrkey solution, too, if you have a home LAN already set up. Just plug it into your switch, turn it on, and you're basically ready to go.
Droppingin said:
I once bought a external hd and started to back up all my image
files, mostly raw. Then started making DVD copies also. Then
procrastinated.

A couple months later I found that my Lacie external hd crashed. I
now am living dangerously on the main hd of my iMac.

Thanks for reminding to get off my as^ ^%$!!!

--
I will never photograph a cockroach.
http://droppingin.smugmug.com/
Click to expand...
 
I back up all of my images after a shoot. It goes into a 300GB external hard-drive. I then burn a CD of this before I even begin messing with the files. After all of my images are completed, I save the entire batch on to an archival CD and store those for about 5 years.

So far, my external drive has not failed nor have I had to go back and retrieve lost data unless a client wants addition images a few years later.
 
I know what it is. I also know it is not safe. It protects you from a single disk failure; it will nor protect from controller failure, virus, accidental deletions, OS corruption, overwriting files, multiple drive failures (unlikely but possible - think impact or overheating), and on and on. RAID is an uptime enhancement, not designed to protect data from any eventuality.
 
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