[oatman911]

My computer is crying big, machiney tears at me. Its getting full, and with the purchase of my new K200d, I'm already busy filling up what little room my baby has left. So here's my question:

What do I backup/store all my pics on? External hard drive (if so, which one)? Online storage? CDs/DVDs?

I'm leaving for Afghanistan on thursday, and I'm pretty sure when I come back, I'll have enough pictures to fill up my laptop at least once over.

What do y'all think?

[Wheatfield]

I just finished losing a few hundred pictures that I had trusted to CDs less than five years ago. These were not cheap CDs burned on a junk writer either, Verbatims burned on a Plexwriter.
needless to say, I'm not happy with optical media at the moment.
Look seriously at a Drobo or other multiple hard drive solution.
I'll never go back to optical storage for anything other than dropping files onto for customers at this point.

[legacyb4]

Single points of storage (redundant or not) won't necessarily fit the bill either.

I'm currently doing the following for myself:

- periodic archives to DVD
- regular backups to external USB drive (I'm on a laptop) with Time Machine
- regular backups to my desktop with Crashplan.com (looking for an offsite location to backup to as well)

Cheers.

[southy]

I just finished losing a few hundred pictures that I had trusted to CDs less than five years ago. These were not cheap CDs burned on a junk writer either, Verbatims burned on a Plexwriter.
needless to say, I'm not happy with optical media at the moment.
Look seriously at a Drobo or other multiple hard drive solution.
I'll never go back to optical storage for anything other than dropping files onto for customers at this point.

Out of curiosity what kind of failure did you have?

I would say now that hard drives are getting so darned cheap, a Raid-1 External/NAS is your best bet, for archiving pictures that you may want to pull up frequently. A decent 1TB redundant setup is only around $300. I like to browse old pictures and mess around, and having all those pictures available at your finger tips is kind of fun. It would be a pain to post process on external though. The Raid-1 setup means that if you lose 1 hard drive, you will still have access to your data to back it up or recover.

A good workflow would be:
Import pictures to Computer
Post Process
If close to full, push oldest x GB to external HDD/NAS
If NAS is full, buy another (or push to DVD)

An old family friend is a professional photographer and he archives his customers data on DVD in a climate controlled room in binders for strictly archival purposes in case a customer wants reprints. DVD's (and other optical media) if stored properly are extremely difficult to degrade, and cheap, but a PITA to find a specific picture from. If you're a recreational photographer, I think the pace at which you would fill external drives would be slow enough to justify the price of the convenience, not to mention you will probably break your shutter before you can fill a 1TB with just pictures, (~67,000+ raw files at 15mb each)

I thought this article was helpful:
How To: How To Choose the Best Network Storage for a Mac/PC Home

HTH,
-southy

[tybeck]

Your best short term option is an external hard drive. Anything from Seagate, WesternDigital, or LeCie is fine. You can find there at your local office supply or electronics box store. There are other options...

I run a ReadyNAS NV+ myself. Great little worker. Instant redundant back up for any computer on my local network. Right now for the money I would say some kind of RAID (mirrored RAID 1 at minimum) or similar setup (like a Drobo with a least 2 drives) is the best value for the money. It is also the minimum, If you really want to be secure you need to have at least one other copy off site. Only that will protect you from things like theft and fire (not pleasant to think about, but it happens).

As far as optical media is concerned I'd say it's touchy. CD-R and DVD-R (and probably BlueRay as well) is going to get you 10 years of reliable storage at best, more likely 3-5. At least this is what NIST is predicting based off their studies. The only solution there is to have at least 2 optical copies of each archive and do a regular quality check. The best optical medium is magneto-optical, but nobody really uses that (common standard for sonogram equipment, that's it and a small consumer market in Japan). In the end other than hard drives tape is your best long term option. Normal cautions of climate controlled environment apply for storage.

Sadly if you want your information to last more than a few decades your best archival option is... paper. Yep, acid-free, archival grade paper. Kind of makes you wonder how much of our present history is going to be around in 100 years.

[Jester_rm]

We've got a WD MyBook external at my office (travel guide publisher in my case), comes with two drives installed (ours is 2x500gb drives), you can run it as individual drives, or RAID Striped or Mirrored. We run it as a mirrored 500gb drive for redundancy. Pretty cheap solution nowdays, and it was plugged in and running in under 15 minutes. No problems with it after a year of constant use at least, and if one of the drives fails they are user replaceable.

Doesn't stop someone from breaking in and walking off with it though. We also have backup copies of our books at our designers office for that purpose, and he has a separate backup system there, and we also burn DVD's of the books when they're finished as well.

[roentarre]

moved to accessory section.

[Ben_Edict]

CDs are not reliable, as Wheatfield experienced. I also lost the contents of several CDs over the years, but as I always brun 3 sets of backups, there usually is at least one still readable version. But now I have all images on DVDs, which are a bit mjore robust.

Nevertheless I store everything on a RAID 6 system (4 Terabytes, 3 Terabytes useable, the rest for security). I can work directly on the RAID via Gigabit Ethernet and it is basically as fast as the internal drives of my Macbook or an iMac, may be a tad slower than the internal drives in a MacPro. From time to time I copy the new images to simple external drives as a second live set, just in case somebody steals the RAID6. I bought this particular product: Solutions for Imaging Professionals

These studioraids come in capacities up to 12 TB in one housing, currently, seems to be much more secure, than the Drobo, apart from the capacity - and faster ofcourse, which is an important factor for me, when using LR or PS.

Ben