[edom31]

Go solid state!!! With a bit of looking, 1 TB solid state drives (SSD) are not much over $100 a piece.

Thanks - Looking at this right now.

[PDL]

Before you buy into stuff, you should consider this common and good working rule for securing your data.
The 3-2-1 Rule:
- 3 Copies of your Data
- 2 places for them
- 1 out of your house (a friends house or a family members house)

This.... SOP for decent backup/archive processing.

[edom31]

The 3-2-1 Rule:
- 3 Copies of your Data
- 2 places for them
- 1 out of your house (a friends house or a family members house)

Thanks for your advice Ti is some other-level thinking here.

[MossyRocks]

I set them up as RAID 5.

Ok that makes some more sense but in that configuration if one drive fails the other 2 don't have identical copies of the data. Since RAID5 requires a minimum of 3 drives the data is spread across 2 of them, each has 1/2 the data, and the 3rd drive has the parity info. Since the parity info is calculated from the data if you drop a drive you can either recreate the parity or recreate the missing info as needed. However if you lose a second drive before the a new drive has been installed and everything is rebuilt then your data is gone. Losing one drive means you have lost either 1/2 of the data or the parity info, losing 2 drives means you have either lost all the data or have lost 1/2 the data and the parity info.

[MossyRocks]

the most often replaced parts where hard drives. Individual drives fail quite often

Well it is because you are getting into the law of large numbers when talking about hard drives in a data center. if the MTBF (mean time before failure) is 10 years then if I have 10 hard drives I would expect to replace one about every year. If instead of 10 hard drives I had 100 with the same 10 year MTBF I would expect to be replacing one about every month. In a large data center several thousand hard drives doesn't seem unreasonable so maybe you are replacing one every day if the MTBF is 10 years. It looks like the MTBF is actually getting better and for modern 4TB drives the worse may be about a 25 year MTBF with the best having a MTBF of about 66 years.

Backing up a single individual's files is easy while doing enterprise backups is a whole different monster. Testing the backup is always a good idea but most people don't even have a single backup, let alone multiple ones that are checked.

[edom31]

I decided to give the Hard drives one more chance. I went with a SSD at 500GB as a test drive (I did not want to invest in a bigger Hard drive in case I'm not satisfied).

I will also very very likely will treat my SD cards as "Film Rolls" - once filled, to be stored and on to the next.

I should've disclosed that I'm not a Pro at this and it is mostly for personal purposes... I'd likely also store things like pdfs of legal documents (marriage, birth certs...), pdfs of my tax returns and such.


In all honesty, the images I'm more concerned about are the ones I do not post here nor in my Flickr - those of my family and baby portraits... these are the ones I want to safe keep more than anything.

[Racer X 69]

Ok that makes some more sense but in that configuration if one drive fails the other 2 don't have identical copies of the data. Since RAID5 requires a minimum of 3 drives the data is spread across 2 of them, each has 1/2 the data, and the 3rd drive has the parity info. Since the parity info is calculated from the data if you drop a drive you can either recreate the parity or recreate the missing info as needed. However if you lose a second drive before the a new drive has been installed and everything is rebuilt then your data is gone. Losing one drive means you have lost either 1/2 of the data or the parity info, losing 2 drives means you have either lost all the data or have lost 1/2 the data and the parity info.

I would like to go for RAID 6, but the case I have isn't big enough for the 6 drives and another drive for the operating system.

Probably gonna sacrifice one of my dead computer towers and build a NAS box.

[normhead]

This is all scary stuff. I still have photo albums from 40 years ago, but all my hard drives from 10 years go, are essentially useless, they have errors that make them super slow. So I now have 5 tertabyes of modern drives... but I've already lost some pictures I would have liked access to. And unlike a photo album where you lose the negs, they have disappeared into cyberspace.

Copying files takes hours.

Not only that to save files I've worked on means saving tiffs, 3 times as large as a raw, for the same information.

Bottom line, a print using 200 year archival ink is the still the only way, you can be sure your images will be viewable by your grandkids 40 years from now if no one is doing regular maintenance. I really need to put a few phonebooks together for my grand kids. They all have one $100 photobook of our trips to the park together.

But, I have photo albums of my grandparents at their weddings and graduations, my parents the same. Baby shots of my mom and her brothers. I suspect, I will be leaving a lot less in terms of the range of the albums. My library of over 100,000 images will be reduced to at 1000 images published in photobooks at best. Simply can't imagine my grandkids will go through the effort of trying to lift my images off what by then will be ancient technology to see my images.

[stevebrot]

Thanks for your advice Ti is some other-level thinking here.

That is simply how it is traditionally done for small or medium-sized operations where data loss is unacceptable. Rotating to off-site storage is the tough part and something currently not in my mix, though it should be. My current approach?

• RAID 1 (mirrored drives)
• Weekly file and sector backup (Acronis) to external drive
• Weekly mirror and drive verification

At the very least, I should probably invest in a second external backup drive and a small fire safe.


Steve

[Racer X 69]

I really need to put a few phonebooks together for my grand kids.

I haven't touched a phonebook in over 15 years.

Do you think the grand kids will even be using phones when they grow up? Or will everyone be using Facetime on their iPhones and iPads?

[Wheatfield]

I decided to give the Hard drives one more chance. I went with a SSD at 500GB as a test drive (I did not want to invest in a bigger Hard drive in case I'm not satisfied).

I will also very very likely will treat my SD cards as "Film Rolls" - once filled, to be stored and on to the next.

I should've disclosed that I'm not a Pro at this and it is mostly for personal purposes... I'd likely also store things like pdfs of legal documents (marriage, birth certs...), pdfs of my tax returns and such.


In all honesty, the images I'm more concerned about are the ones I do not post here nor in my Flickr - those of my family and baby portraits... these are the ones I want to safe keep more than anything.

The really important to you pictures you have should be printed, preferably on real photographic paper, not an inkjet or dye sub. Prints have proven over a century and a half that they have good staying power, and they require nothing more than benign neglect in a dark and dry location to last for decades.

[RGlasel]

Prints have proven over a century and a half that they have good staying power

Not to mention that both the software and hardware for viewing prints is future-proof, which can't be said for digital media. The downsides to photographic prints are the inability to compress them without introducing artifacts, along with the cost and time required to archive them; making it necessary to think about what you keep for posterity and what gets discarded and/or forgotten. Maybe the last point should be thought of as a positive attribute, without context a photograph, regardless of its format, is worthless and in our ADHD world, time erases context much faster than it used to.

[Wheatfield]

Not to mention that both the software and hardware for viewing prints is future-proof, which can't be said for digital media. The downsides to photographic prints are the inability to compress them without introducing artifacts, along with the cost and time required to archive them; making it necessary to think about what you keep for posterity and what gets discarded and/or forgotten. Maybe the last point should be thought of as a positive attribute, without context a photograph, regardless of its format, is worthless and in our ADHD world, time erases context much faster than it used to.

Quite honestly, the shoebox under the bed is pretty much the ideal storage location, it's dark, and generally should be dry. A shoe box can hold many hundreds of prints. I think far too many people overthink this stuff.
As for compressing them, you are joking, right?

[edom31]

Simply can't imagine my grandkids will go through the effort of trying to lift my images off what by then will be ancient technology to see my images.

Well technically I want them to be loking a "their" images, that I took

---------- Post added 06-20-19 at 03:23 PM ----------

The really important to you pictures you have should be printed, preferably on real photographic paper, not an inkjet or dye sub.

This will have to be done, yes. that is another 12 hrs to sort to which ones I want printed... time is underminded sometimes.

[RGlasel]

As for compressing them, you are joking, right?

Sometimes when I follow an analogy to its logical conclusion, I get some bizarre images in my head. I was joking (somewhat), but we (I) get some strange results when we (I) try to apply what was important for film photography or corporate financial records to our (my) personal digital photography. Thinking back on the photographs I have taken in the last 45 years and the older photographs that I have inherited (ended up with), I have no idea what I should be preserving for 45 years from now. As long as I don't need to dig down too far to find something, I can keep on saving everything and anything, but if it becomes impossible to find anything specific, my backups will be useless. My paternal grandmother had a single pre-WWI photograph (most of her immediate family died from Spanish Flu after being relocated by the Russian government during the war), it wasn't too hard to figure out what to keep. Who cares about motion blur and a hideous floral backdrop, that single photograph is all my aunts, uncles and cousins have to connect themselves to their ancestors.