Safest Way to Backup Photos - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

Clarkey · 01-02-2011, 06:54 PM

I've got about 70GB of photos stored on my hard drive. I've backed up about 40 gigs on DVD's. This became a bit burdensome so I bought a 1TB Seagate external hard drive. Well after using it a couple times it stopped working (I believe the term is "bricked itself"). This has scared me away from using one of these external HD's for backup.

What are my best options for backing up files? I recently bought a 8GB USB flash drive for $10 bucks. Should I just buy a bunch of these and load my photos on them? I heard that flash drives are safer due to no rotating parts.

What about online storage? Is this a safe option? My fear having my data out of my hands, what if the storage company goes out of business or gets targeted by hackers?

sclitheroe · 01-02-2011, 07:06 PM

3-2-1

3 copies (1 working copy, 2 backups)

on :

2 different kinds of media or devices

and of those:

1 offsite

Other stuff:
- USB flash drives are worse, overall, for reliability than DVD's or hard drives. This goes doubly and triply for cheap USB flash drives. I run across users with lost data almost weekly from crap thumbdrives

- Consider using a cloud based backup system. I have about 1.5 TB stored in Mozy now, at a cost of $5 per month. Even if you don't use a cloud based system, if you are serious about backups you must have one copy offsite. Theft/fire/technical problem/stupidity could all render your local copies useless.

- Mozy is owned by EMC, a huge player in the storage market. I highly doubt they are going away. All of the big online backup providers encrypt the data before it leaves your machine, and don't have the key, so even if hackers got your data, they'd have to break the encryption.

- Test your backups. Just because you get a directory listing from a DVD doesn't mean the data is there an intact. Copy off a couple photos and open them up. Do this monthly. Backups are useless if you don't know that you can pull data back from them. I do this with Mozy as well - every month I pull a couple files down from the cloud and verify they were stored intact.

pylon · 01-02-2011, 07:22 PM

I store one on my computer, one on my external, and now, with how ridiculously cheap sd cards are, once I fill the card with quality photos, I simply lock and tag the card. In reality, I find 1 of evey 5 pphotos I take, is really worth keeping long term, and as I download onto my computer, I delete the just okay stuff off the card, and keep the really memorable stuff on it. Once I fill the card, I simply stop using it, and put it in my safe, and treat it like a set of negatives.

On a 16GB or 32 GB card, at 15 or 18 mp, depending on what I am shooting with, it still works out to around 500-1000 photos per card, for what, $50? Imagine the cost if that was film. Plus by the time you fill your $50 card with actual good pictures, in reality, it is probably a $5 or $10 card due to depreciation. In the past people were lucky to take 500 great photos their whole lives on film, and with digital media, people just tend to put it in burst mode, hold the trigger down in auto setting, on their $1500 dslr with the stock lens (with a flower hood of course, in a dark setting.. lol) and think they are the worlds next great photographer. They end up having so many average pictures, they don't know what truly makes one great, and they get lost in their thousands of bad shots.

Also think of this, with what you spent on the external, and the thumb drives, how many SD cards could you have bought? Think about it.

Mad Mel · 01-02-2011, 07:43 PM

sclitheroe's advice about cloud storage is pretty kickass. It's the way the computing world is going these days, and will only get cheaper. Consider too that the service provider's data will in turn be backed up off their site. Personally, I just trust a real data warehouse service more than my own methods of madness.

Clarkey · 01-02-2011, 08:57 PM

Thanks I like the idea of keeping the memory cards. I think I'll back up the existing stuff on dvd's as I've been doing, back up everything to online storage, and then going forward keep the memory cards (and continue with the online storage). My photos are really one of the few irreplaceable items I have.

Hack&Lube · 01-02-2011, 09:30 PM

I'm surprised nobody has said to print them out.

Rathji · 01-02-2011, 10:27 PM

I will second the offsite backup idea.

I use Crashplan to backup to an external drive and to 2 offsite locations.

The way Crashplan works is you can backup for free to a folder on your computer (on an external drive), another computer on your local network, and to another computer anywhere in the world that is running Crashplan.

My setup backs both of our laptops up to my desktop, then the desktop backs everything up to the external hard drive and to both my Mom's house and my Grandma's house, where I have plugged in external 1.5 TB HDD into their computers. Then they back up what they have to each other, and to me.

It is pretty hard on bandwidth, especially to set it up, but you can make the initial backup to the hard drive and then transport it offsite and it is simple to attach, and then only incremental changes are uploaded.

You can also upload to their service for less than $5 bucks a month, but there is a fee to seed the initial data to avoid a huge upload time, so I decided to shell out for the hard drives instead. If you do use the paid service, I am pretty sure it will work for all computers in your family, including computers of people away at school etc.

pylon · 01-02-2011, 10:38 PM

Just to add, I have read that memory cards have an estimated lifespan of 10 years. So make sure you date the last use, and every five years or so, back up the data to another card. Just in case. You will likely collect a lot of higher capacity spares over the years. Right now I have about 10 outdated blanks. And 8 32 gb class 10's I picked up for crazy cheap, $20 each. I could shoot raw for the next 10 years on my 60d and not get enough photos to fill them all. Plus, if you know you are shooting stuff that will never exceed an 8 x 10, it is pointless to shoot in 18 mp mode. 5 is more than adequate if you plan to develop them. So that will get you even more mileage. Personally, I have an 16 mb SD card on it's 10th year now, and all the files are perfectly fine on it, so I think by a ten year lifespan, they mean 10 years of normal writing/deleting/rewriting use.

What I am waiting for however, is a way to have the best pics, transferred from the cards to negatives, as negatives stored properly, are good for a century or more. Anyone know who does this?

MoneyGuy · 01-03-2011, 08:59 AM

I'm no expert but this works for me. I bought Click Free. Cost was a little over a hundred bucks but I just plug a small device into my USB port and once it's set up (easily done) it automatically backs up everything. It can back up about 10 computers. I love it. If I ever lose my data, I can just restore. I bought it years ago so am not sure of the cost today.

DownInFlames · 01-03-2011, 09:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

- Consider using a cloud based backup system. I have about 1.5 TB stored in Mozy now, at a cost of $5 per month. Even if you don't use a cloud based system, if you are serious about backups you must have one copy offsite. Theft/fire/technical problem/stupidity could all render your local copies useless.

This is the best advice I can give as well. Some people balk at using a service like Mozy because it may take days, or even weeks, to get your first backup uploaded "to the cloud". But after that you'll have peace of mind that the service is uploading any new files you've created automatically.

I've heard good things about Mozy, but I went with Backblaze because they will ship you a hard drive with your data on it in the event of a total loss. I have almost as much data backed up online as sclitheroe, and it would take forever to have to download it all.

I also keep my local backups in a fire safe. It's not 100% protection, but it adds enough extra security to be worth it.

sclitheroe · 01-03-2011, 09:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DownInFlames

This is the best advice I can give as well. Some people balk at using a service like Mozy because it may take days, or even weeks, to get your first backup uploaded "to the cloud". But after that you'll have peace of mind that the service is uploading any new files you've created automatically.

I've heard good things about Mozy, but I went with Backblaze because they will ship you a hard drive with your data on it in the event of a total loss. I have almost as much data backed up online as sclitheroe, and it would take forever to have to download it all.

I also keep my local backups in a fire safe. It's not 100% protection, but it adds enough extra security to be worth it.

Mozy will do the same - I think via DVD's, but they definitely have a shipped-media option available for recovery.

DownInFlames · 01-03-2011, 09:44 AM

That's cool, and I bet if you talked to them they would probably ship a hard drive since that would be cheaper and easier. 1.5 TB would mean hundreds of DVDs.

fredr123 · 01-03-2011, 11:43 AM

Can anyone share some thoughts on Carbonite?

Also, having tried using the external HD option to backup my iPhoto library and subsequently restore it, I wonder if anyone has any advice for removing duplicate photos from a photo library? I think my ill-fated recovery attempts have left three or more copies of some photos scattered throughout my computer for no real good reason.

DownInFlames · 01-03-2011, 12:23 PM

I tried Carbonite after hearing it advertised on podcasts like TWiT. It was good at first, but then I noticed after about 200GB they started limiting how much I could upload. I could barely upload a gigabyte per day, while I was taking an average of 16GB of photos per week. If you're going to backup less than 200GB total they're fine, but otherwise go with one of the other options mentioned.

sclitheroe · 01-03-2011, 12:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fredr123

Can anyone share some thoughts on Carbonite?

Also, having tried using the external HD option to backup my iPhoto library and subsequently restore it, I wonder if anyone has any advice for removing duplicate photos from a photo library? I think my ill-fated recovery attempts have left three or more copies of some photos scattered throughout my computer for no real good reason.

Carbonite will only backup internal drives. This made it a non-starter for my Mac Mini, which has an attached Drobo for mass storage. If you've only got a laptop, it wouldn't be an issue.

This is an important footnote for most, if not all, online backup solutions though - they aren't an archiving service. With Mozy, for example, if I detach an external drive from the system that was previously backed up to Mozy, after 30 days those files are removed from the cloud backup as they are deemed to be "gone", since the external drive is no longer attached to the system.

These products are meant to be backups of functioning, complete systems; not online storage of offline (or detached) archives.

Clarkey · 01-05-2011, 12:20 PM

Another good suggestion; a co-worker suggested I get a blue-ray burner to backup my photos. I believe you can get 25GB per disc. This would be a lot easier than the multiple DVD's I've been doing.

Ironhorse · 07-27-2011, 10:41 PM

nm, wrong thread.

Ace · 05-29-2012, 01:09 PM

Bump...Is there such a service that allows me to set a drive on my laptop that is essentially online cloud storage. Could I ghost my system to this drive?

Rathji · 05-29-2012, 01:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ace

Bump...Is there such a service that allows me to set a drive on my laptop that is essentially online cloud storage. Could I ghost my system to this drive?

You mean online service syncing with your hard drive, or just mapping some random location on the internet as a network drive?

If it is the first, then Dropbox, Microsoft Skydrive or Google drive would probably work. If it is the second, then I know of no such service other than a FTP site or similar type thing, but thats not really what you are asking for (I don't think).

What you probably are looking for is something like what most backup services offer. I use Crashplan and it provides a backup online as well as on any hard drive connected to your computer (or a computer of a friend even).Other options are listed previously in this thread. It's not a ghost image though.

Ace · 05-29-2012, 01:24 PM

^ Presently I back up my system with a complete image..., which gets saved on an external drive. Can I keep this procedure but replace the external drive with an online drive (it sounds like...not really)

I also share all these files over my network to various computers (the files are on an external drive)...I basically want to keep this set up, but replace the external drive with a cloud drive.

My key folders are sync'd so I can use them whenever and then they auto update when I plug back into the network. Essentially I'd like the "network" to be replaced with an online solution.