"Better Safe Than Sorry"

*benjikan* · 06-26-2009, 04:42 PM

Being that we are living profoundly in a digital age, it is imperative that I share with you my concerns about how to keep your images safe for future generations to have the opportunity of viewing your catalog of work. In the past there were negatives, positives (slides) and prints which, if taken care of and stored properly, could survive several decades without serious degradation. Today we are hit by a number of possible dangers that could erase for eternity any of those images that were captured for posterity and meant so much to you, your loved ones, businesses and archives wishing to preserve the image which mirrors the social fabric of the day.

I became keenly aware of this problem when I converted to digital image capture. It is not practical for me to print all of the work I have done and thus had to find a way of minimizing the possibility of losing my works. There are many ways ones could safeguard their images. There is CD, which I find very problematic to say the least. DVD’s which I find equally troublesome, DAT, which is a wonderful medium, but, try to find a DAT player today. I archive my work on about 8 (eight), yes 8 external and internal hard drives in two different locations. I make it a practice to save all of the final retouched published images of mine on all of these devices and store to all of them religiously when a job has been completed. I.e. post production included. I save my Raw images on to at least 3 to 4 external hard drives as well.

Many consider this as over kill. But imagine the thought of losing your archives to some electrical anomaly. In some ways it would be akin to losing your identity. All of those images that were an expression of your world view, lost for ever.

It is for this reason that I HIGHLY recommend that you save your images and any other important files to at least 2 hard drives or 3 for that extra measure of security. Eventually “Cloud Systems” might be the way to go, but imagine for some reason that the internet is down for an extended period of time and access to your precious files is impossible. So for now, until Crystal Quartz storage becomes the norm, I sincerely hope that you take my advice. As the old adage states; “Better Safe than Sorry.”

Benjamin Kanarek Blog “Better Safe than Sorry”

Jim Royal · 06-26-2009, 04:50 PM

I heartily approve of your appraoch, Ben. I have tried CD, DVD, DAT... I finally settled, as you have, on multiple external drives, located away from the computer. I back up to one drive located inside the computer and to two drives kept in a watertight industrial storage box. That's three backups, and I think that's reasonable.

*Duck Dodgers* · 06-26-2009, 06:53 PM

New drives can fail whilst sitting in a drawer. Ask me how I know.

My regimen is:

Save to hard drive directory ("orginals")
Save to same hard drive ("backups")
Save to second hard drive ("backups")
Save to DVDs quarterly AND (this is the important part) store off-site
Save to external hard drive yearly AND...store off-site

As long as your data is (are?) properly copied and stored as technology progresses, there's no reason digital photos can't outlast film and prints.

Famous last words in my world: "You backed-up, right?"

Mr. The Guy · 06-26-2009, 07:47 PM

Originally Posted by benjikan

“Better Safe than Sorry.”

Benjamin Kanarek Blog “Better Safe than Sorry”

There are two kinds of people. Those who back-up, and those who have never had a hard drive failure.

I go one step beyond the recommendations here that I heartily endorse and make sure the HDs are manufactured by different companies. Additionally, I recommend using different file system formats.

philbaum · 06-26-2009, 08:59 PM

Originally Posted by benjikan

Many consider this as over kill. But imagine the thought of losing your archives to some electrical anomaly. In some ways it would be akin to losing your identity. All of those images that were an expression of your world view, lost for ever.

Benjamin Kanarek Blog “Better Safe than Sorry”

Benjamin,
Overkill, no i don't think so. Not after what happened to me last weekend. Certainly not for someone with your professional skill.

I just have an external 3.5" hard drive for my images and one backup hard drive to that one.

I took them both along on a short trip last weekend, realizing i would have some time to do a backup. I had them both on a coffee table where i stayed, and stepped over the cables to get a drink, making very sure that i didn't snag any of the cables. But i did snag the cable to my backup drive, a Maxtor 500 megabyte drive, and it tumbled a short distance (less than 18 inch) to a carpeted floor with foam underlayment. No external physical damage to the drive but it appears jammed up and won't read or write. I spent an hour that night looking at some of my finer images, realizing this might be the last time i might see them.

Went out to the store first thing in the morning and got a Seagate FreeAgent Go 320 megabyte 2.5" drive thats made for laptops, easy to carry, store and i think probably built for a little bit more shock. Only problem was that it took 17 hours to back up my 200 gigabytes of images. I'm now going to do some studying to find out what i need to do quicker backups, 17 hours seems obscene. But i'm sure theres a 3rd hard drive in my future as soon as i figure out what i should buy on the next go around. 2 drives is not enough as my story illustrates.

I'm also not sure it makes sense to treat all images as the same value. I'm contemplating letting lightroom sort out my 5 star images and putting them on a separate drive for a periodic backup of "special" images: Haven't thought this through.

thanks for the reminder by the way!!!!!!!

Parallax · 06-27-2009, 07:58 AM

Originally Posted by benjikan

.......................Many consider this as over kill. But imagine the thought of losing your archives to some electrical anomaly. In some ways it would be akin to losing your identity. All of those images that were an expression of your world view, lost for ever............................

Nothing that puts your mind at ease is overkill. Murphy's law should be heavily factored into everything that involves computers.

kenyee · 06-27-2009, 07:32 PM

Originally Posted by philbaum

Only problem was that it took 17 hours to back up my 200 gigabytes of images.

It's because USB 2.0 is horrible for transferring lots of data. Even though they claim their speed is more than firewire, even lowly firewire400 is lots faster. I have an external drive for backups and using firewire to back up my windows partition take 20min but using the usb2.0 port on the same drive takes hours

The Drobo is a fairly simple to use redundant data store if you don't want to muck around w/ Linux too...

photog · 06-28-2009, 12:24 AM

I have 2 500GB WD sata2 drives in cases (1 is a Coolermaster and the other is a Max4 Thermaltake case) sitting on my desk plugged into eSATA ports on the back of my PC (2 TB internal). Image files are stores on 2 different drives internally. Before LR2 or ACR is allowed to d/l images through card reader I switch the eSATA drive on, it spins up and is recognized and I check the box in ACR for a copy of the originals to be saved to a backup location on the external drive.
Before leaving for extended time I remove the backup drives and store off site.
Although no storage medium is infallible I have more confidenjce in HDD than in optical media. Not to mention the number of DVD needed to back up 200 GB.
Ron McDermott

*Wombat* · 06-28-2009, 03:52 AM

Reminders of this kind are always timely and welcome, Ben. Thanks.

When I worked in radio we used to backup large music files onto videotape. Apparently tape is a much more reliable storage medium than CD, DVD etc. and it's pretty cheap compared with DAT. Has anyone tried storing photos this way? I'm not sure how you could physically connect a video recorder to a computer to store graphics, but someone will know.

timbo13 · 06-28-2009, 05:02 AM

Originally Posted by Wombat

Reminders of this kind are always timely and welcome, Ben. Thanks.

When I worked in radio we used to backup large music files onto videotape. Apparently tape is a much more reliable storage medium than CD, DVD etc. and it's pretty cheap compared with DAT. Has anyone tried storing photos this way? I'm not sure how you could physically connect a video recorder to a computer to store graphics, but someone will know.

Ben is absolutely on the mark regarding the importance of backup!!

I used to work (years ago) in R&D for a storage device company, in the tape group, so this is a subject near and dear to my heart. Data backup tape = very high quality videotape as far as the formulation. Regular video recorders are analog devices and not a good choice for storing digital information, plus they are on the way out as consumer devices. For those reasons, I don't think it would be worth the effort to try and back up digital images that way.
The drives I worked on were a lot of money for home use, but very popular for data centers, servers, things like that. If you have images on line with a hosting service they are most likely backed up on this kind of technology. For home use I like multiple hard drives for low cost and ease of use.

*reeftool* · 06-28-2009, 11:31 AM

Lots of good advice here. Probably everybody will have a slightly different backup strategy but the importance of having backups can't be stressed enough. I have a friend who is in the military and lost a hard drive which contained the pictures he took during a tour in Antartica. Thats not the kind of place you can easily return to to take another batch of photos. I have backups on 3 drives on 2 different computers plus DVD's. Not a perfect system but I have had to replace a drive and I lost nothing but the time spent. SD cards are so cheap now you could almost just keep the cards and not erase them as an additional "backup".

Niki · 06-28-2009, 12:35 PM

great advice!
I keep my dig on 3 or 4 sources...not that they are worth anything special except to me =)

junyo · 06-28-2009, 02:21 PM

A buddy of mine and I traded 1TB RAID5 NAS's and run a private VPN. Data is mirrored locally and offsite (out of state) nightly.

At least with me, I had to build a mechanism that happened automatically, with no input from me once it was setup. Because, based on experience, a process is great, but there's going to be a day that you get lazy and don't do it, and that will be the day you need it.

In terms of cost per megabyte, it's hard to beat Winchester style drives, but the failure rate is ridiculous, and despite S.M.A.R.T. technology they fail without warning. Therefore I went with redundancy in layers. A RAID5 is more than a couple of big drives, but it also means a drive failure is an annoyance rather than an emergency. And constant automated offsite backups give a peace of mind that is priceless. Unless something takes out a 100 mile radius, once it's on my network share, the most I lose is 24 hours worth of data (because it didn't have time to sync).

joebob · 06-29-2009, 02:27 PM

Originally Posted by Wombat

Reminders of this kind are always timely and welcome, Ben. Thanks.

When I worked in radio we used to backup large music files onto videotape. Apparently tape is a much more reliable storage medium than CD, DVD etc. and it's pretty cheap compared with DAT. Has anyone tried storing photos this way? I'm not sure how you could physically connect a video recorder to a computer to store graphics, but someone will know.

Why is CD or DVD less reliable than tape?

elLuiggi · 06-29-2009, 05:23 PM

Originally Posted by benjikan

Being that we are living profoundly in a digital age, it is imperative that I share with you my concerns about how to keep your images safe for future generations to have the opportunity of viewing your catalog of work. In the past there were negatives, positives (slides) and prints which, if taken care of and stored properly, could survive several decades without serious degradation. ”[/url]

I'm not sure that you can preserve all these files for generations to come. Consider that today's filetypes (PEF, DNG, jpgs, etc) are likely to be replaced in the future and if not converted to the new standard at the time the shift happens, you are bound to loose the ability to read them

The same holds true for the media used to archive the files.