[scatron]

That said, wish me luck with my data recovery.

Good luck and try this: Apple - Mac OS X Time Machine

[amoringello]

RAID is great, my photos sit on two RAID drives in house so I always have two safe copies (working and backup). But if the house burns down due to heat from all the hard drives :-) , or someone steals all my stuff, I'm still SOL!!!

Think about off-line storage.
Crabonite sounds great. I use BackBlaze. Very similar in capabilities and costs.
Backblaze will overnight a hard drive (up to 480MB) with your data if necessary. Dunno if Carbonite has a similar option yet. Obviously for a small cost, but how much is your data worth when its gone?

Flickr may be nice, but I don't know what they offer for retrieval of all your photos. I am pretty sure they do not store RAW, XMP and PSD files. So think about all that might be involved with re-creating your work.

[falconeye]

One of our customers has a RAID array / tape backup server sitting in a fire-proof strong room. And still they fear it could fail Sleeping virus attack is the biggest danger. Of course, the data is such that off-site storage is no option.

One of my friends used to have a cyclic email forwarding chain keeping important data "in the orbit" as he said


SmugMug offers SmugVault: Safe Backup which is an unlimited backup service for photographers run by Amazon.com.

The main cost is $2640 per Terabyte per year which is why I am not using it. But it can be an interesting option for pros or up to 100 Gigs. BTW, getting it directly via Amazon is the cheaper option: $1229 per Terabyte per year. Which is a lot cheaper per GB than MobileMe

Yet another option is https://www.delldatasafe.com/. $590 per Terabyte per year. Except that they only offer up to 0.1 TB accounts

[amoringello]

Ouch! $1200+ a year? Carbonite and Backblaze, roughly $50 a year for unlimited storage. I have roughly 3 to 4TB up there now.
But I'm sure the more expensive route has better options for quick upload and restoration of large amounts of data, which in some cases may be worth it.

I'll have to look at SmugMug's backup option. I want to look at them for hosting gallery and sales site anyway.

[falconeye]

Carbonite and Backblaze, roughly $50 a year for unlimited storage. [...]
I'll have to look at SmugMug's backup option. I want to look at them for hosting gallery and sales site anyway.

$50 />4TB/y is cheap. I am bit suspicious about the cheap providers though. I once used a free image hosting service which promised to keep files for an unlimited amount of time and with no bandwidth restriction for access. After a couple of months all my files got deleted. Because of too much traffic...

On the other hand, Backblaze looks great on paper. Let's hope they can cover the costs to run their service. They certainly don't expect more than some 100 GB backup volume from their average customer. They better add a footnote that 10 TB photo/video archives are not included in their service

I liked their FAQ entry:

Look, I'm an Advanced User, and I Already Have a Set of RAID Drives with Perl Scripts to Copy My Files Back and Forth Between My 18 Home Machines that are in a Datacenter I've Built in My Closet. Why Do I Need Backblaze?

SmugMug is a good option for JPG. There is a restriction on file size (12 MB I believe) and image size 48MP with the cheaper accounts. But that's fair enough and number of images seems to be unlimited. It is easy to keep files private as well.

[Ben_Edict]

How long does it take to upload the first three TB initially via ADSL? That's ages. I also use my main RAID 6 to work on it all the time, as then all my Photoshopping is also safe during the work phase. I sometimes work days or weeks on a single image, again and again, and then I need centralized storage, to avoid double work or concurring versions. That all means, I need the fast access my RAID provides over Gigabit ethernet. (≥100 MB/s).

I am deeply mistrustful about storing my data at an online storage service, especially an US one. Data protection is very weak and even that is not enforced, if I just look at services like Facebook, the several attempts by Adobe to lure photogs to put their images online etc.

And given the prices, Falk quoted, I can easily install just another RAID at a friend's home as a backup.

Ben

[amoringello]

Yeah, I kinda wondered how those places can do it so cheaply, but you figure in massive bulk a 1TB hard drive is probably well near $50. I certainly blow the curve, but I suspect generally suspect that most people have far under 100GB of data. Remember, these places do not back up your whole machine, only the extraneous data. They assume you can re-install the OS and applications separately. (a bit of a pain, but I find that acceptable).

When I had about one TB, it took nearly two weeks for the initial upload. But I have something like 7Mb upload speeds.
Both companies allow throttling of throughput so that it doesn't saturate your internet connection during normal use, but still I have not seen much affect. I kept it full speed all the time. Now when I take a few hundred photos, they go up in very little time.

Some of that 3TB+ space might be across multiple versions, so restore may not be as bad as it sounds. One aspect I like -- they keep multiple versions of files for a number of weeks or months.

Hopefully they make enough profit to stay in business. I don't look forward to another month+ to back up. Maybe by that time we'll have Gigabit Ethernet to the home. :-)

[Tamia]

So very sorry that you lost your photos. Multiple backups, as others have suggested, are one hedge against this happening again. I also have a Zenfolio account where I have loaded some of my better photos, but by all means not all. Three external hard drives, USB sticks, DVDs which I sent to my brother for additional storage just in case, and another computer help give me some peace of mind.

Don't be so sure that film is an answer, though. I lost thousands of slides and more prints in a house fire which sparked when I was away from home. No chance to save anything. Lost it all, nothing left but the broken down VW Bug, clothes on my back, and my bike, which a fireman had hauled out of the house. Nothing lasts forever. At least with digital, you can make multiple copies very easily and cheaply, and leave those in different places.

[johnmflores]

Sorry OP that you lost your stuff. If you really want it back then there are services that can recover data from a failed drive. They are pretty effective - that's why the Air Force has some highly-destructive techniques to destroy the data drives on jets that go down in enemy territory. It's great to see that your seeing the silver lining in the cloud though - many of us spend so much time preserving images - most of which will probably be lost soon after we've shuffled off this mortal coil.

FWIW I've got 7TB of external HDs sitting on a shelf next to me. 4TB is dedicated to Apple Time Machine. Unless the house burns down or the bookshelf falls I'm relatively safe. My next step is an off-site copy.

I never had any luck with Mozy (like Carbonite). Couldn't get a complete backup, but I presume that it's due to the sheer volume.

And no matter what backup plan you've got, do yourself a favor and test it at least once a year. There's nothing worse that thinking that you have a safety net and then realizing that you don't

[MikeW]

Bummer, bummer, bummer! I've had it happen and I feel your pain even though it was a long time ago and I didn't lose nearly as much stuff as you did. I hope the data recovery wizards can get your stuff back; it would be worth paying a lot.

I've been looking into Backblaze for our Macs. I particularly like their option to back up from your external drives. I've got several external drives and religiously back up to them, but houses burn down and things get stolen. Online is looking better and better.

[sebberry]

OP: Make sure you keep the hard drive.

What probably needs to be done is to have the drive dismantled by a professional recovery service.

Ontrack is probably one of the better ones out there. They were able to recover data fom a hard drive recovered from the Shuttle Columbia disaster. It was badly burned and found in a dried up lake bed yet they were able to get over 90% of the data back.

[TOUGEFC]

Sorry to hear OP, i try and make as much backup as i can via externall hard drive's, cd's, and online hosting sites.

[Pentaxie]

Feel so sorry for the OP.
But I was informed that if can be recovered through services that can recover data from a failed drive.
I do agreed that many of us spend so much time preserving the images that we took, but lack the ingenuity to have a back-up plan if we ever lost the images due to factors beyond our control.

[LensScribe]

To the OP, let us know if anything comes of the data recovery. Aside from those mentioned, are there any other online solutions (capable of handling +/-300gb) that people have found reliable? I've got SyncToy running a weekly back up of the important things on an external, but if the house burns down (or similar) that's not going to do any good...

Oh God, I feel your pain. I am so sorry.

It has happened to me once before too. The difference is that my pictures were all crap.

I bet you that recovery software can recover a lot of it. If you are willing to spend the big bucks I bet you can retrieve most of them.