[OregonJim]

as for operator faults, that's pretty ridiculous. why would i randomly erase / screw things up?

Do you think *anyone* does this on purpose?

Now that you've stated publicly that it's ridiculous, Murphy's Law says it will happen to you.

[Sean Nelson]

From people who should know better:
Re: [Savannah-users] Savannah outage v2

I feel for those guys. I've been in situations where RAID controllers didn't do what they were supposed to do. Fortunately I went through those travails on non-production servers (that's what test and QA systems are for, aren't they?).

The fact is that RAID, while a very valuable and useful technology, adds complexity and failure modes that just don't exist for plain bare disks. And it runs on software which is not as bug-free as the manufacturers would like us to believe.

So you can't rest on your laurels - RAID brings with it the obligation to test all of the failure scenarios to make sure it really works the way you think it should, and even then you've got to CYA with good backups.

[MJB DIGITAL]

I come home from a job, and dump the photos onto the hard drive, then I zip an archive onto the other hard drive, then I burn a set of original RAWs to an archival grade DVD.

Then I go to work on the first set that I dumped onto the hard drive.

Then I take a break and have some coffee.

[Niki]

mongo external HD

[ChrisPlatt]

With moderate care in storage film will last a lifetime...

Chris

[waynelr]

I went to a RAID-5 SATA solution using three 1 Terabyte HD's. Works efficiently and any drive is hot swappable. With the price of storage today its a great solution. For offsite storage I dump my DB to an external drive a couple of times per year and deliver it to my son's house.

We tried copying online, but its far too slow to be practical with 150 GB of pictures.

Initializing RAID-5 on a XP system is a bit of a trick though.

[Sean Nelson]

I went to a RAID-5 SATA solution using three 1 Terabyte HD's.

Very nice, except that RAID is NOT backup (as per several previous posts in this thread)...

[tomele]

1. Main storage of RAW files and post-processed JPEG on my home computer (4 hard disks in a RAID-10 linux software RAID array)
2. Daily (scheduled) backup of all local JPEG files to my remote dedicated server, which is hosted in a datacenter 250km away. Server disk itself is mirrored every night to the hosting company's SAN
3. Upload of all JPEG to Picasa Web Albums (purchased 10 GB additional space from Google for 20$/yr)

Who said I am paranoid with my pictures ?

[heliphoto]

Bump as a reminder to keep up on your backups... (why did I put this in "General Photography - Techniques & Styles"? - perhaps a moderator will move it if appropriate.)

[dadipentak]

Somehow, I never got the hang of burning CDs & DVDs. Rather than clog up my desktop harddrive, I use a external HD for photos and I back that up on another external HD from time to time (somewhere between monthly & quarterly) For "deep backup" I copy files to yet another external and give it to my son to keep at his house.

[Lowell Goudge]

after reading all of the responses again, including my own, there is one response that I am sure Adam of all people would love.

simply upload all of the m to the pentax forum server

Just kidding.

[WMBP]

I am as humble as the next guy, I think, and I realize that I've taken no more than twenty or thirty photos whose loss would impoverish the world. But it's not all about me. I promise brides and other event clients that I will hang on to their originals for 1 year after the event; and of course there's the time between the event and delivery of photos to the client to consider as well. And while few of my wedding photos are as intrinisically valuable as one of Cartier-Bresson's old socks, they are valuable to my clients and would become valuable to me if I lost them and then got sued.

So I try to be careful with clients' photos because it's my responsibility to be; and I am careful with my own personal photos because, well, they matter to me personally.

*

Digital

Here's what I do to keep my digital files safe.

1. During the event, the 2 cameras that I shoot with mostly do not leave my sight - generally don't leave my neck - because they have cards in them. If one or the other of the 8 GB cards gets filled up, I remove the used card and put it into a cash wallet that hangs around my neck, inside my shirt. This is the same cash wallet that I used in China to carry about $14,000.
2. As soon as I get home from an event (or if it's VERY late, first thing the next morning) I copy the photos off the cards and on to my hard disk.
3. I then put the cards from the event into a box with a label ("Smith 11-12-2009") and place those in a special safe drawer in my office. These cards are not touched again until the DVD is delivered to the clients a few weeks later.
4. Once the files are on the hard disk, I burn a DVD or CD to create a separate copy. This is where I'm most vulnerable. At this point, it would be very unfortunate for all concerned if our house burned down that night. So far, I've been lucky.
5. Now I let Carbonite go to work. Carbonite is an online backup service. Costs about $50 a year and backs up everything in my documents folder - including all my photos. I leave the computer on that first night and indeed most nights, so Carbonite can do its thing. That means within about 24 hours (maybe less) I have an online backup of everything. Carbonite backs up my entire digital photo collection, everything I've taken since 2000 and all the raw files since January 2007.
6. Next day, I sync the My Pictures folder with a mirror of it on a 750 GB external drive. This external drive is not my primary backup: that's Carbonite. Carbonite backs up everything automatically, while I sync the external drive only when I think about it - sometimes once a week, sometimes every month or so. At the moment, for example, I don't have anything on this drive at all. It developed a problem and, after triple-checking that everything is there on Carbonite's servers, I initialized this drive and fixed the problem. Now I have to start over.
7. Now, for the next couple of weeks, changes continue to be backed up by Carbonite, plus I have THREE other copies of everything (original SD cards, DVD or CDs, and the mirror on the external drive) so I don't worry too much at this point. I really should send the DVDs to my mother's house but my mother is a nicotine fiend and actually her house is much more likely to burn to the ground than mine. So I'm basically trusting Carbonite at this point.
8. As I finish editing photos, I export them to jpeg, and then upload either to SmugMug or to Picasa Web Albums. I try to work on the best or most interesting images first in part because I like to eat my dessert before I eat my green beans, but also because that way I get those images processed for showing to clients and also because it means they're out of my house and saved somewhere online (besides Carbonite's servers).
9. When I finish, I usually send the client a DVD of full-res jpegs of all the photos I picked. That DVD is accompanied by a note to the client advising them to take care of it and letting them know that I won't keep their originals for more than 1 year.
10. If the photos are personal rather than for work, the processed copies get uploaded a.s.a.p. to an online gallery, nowadays, Picasa Web Albums. I just paid $5 to increase my storage at Picasa Web Albums to 20 GB for the next year. I'm thinking of canceling my very old Flickr account and moving all those old photos to Picasa. Anyway, a copy of everything that I value personally ends up online.

So much for the digital files.


*

Print

I should add that, while I didn't start taking digital photos until 2000, I've been working with computers since about 1985. I have extensive experience with lost files and files not exactly lost but grown inaccessible due to changes in file formats. I've lost book manuscripts (well, one book MS). I've lost the digital versions of musical works, poems, letters, articles, and much more. I have very little faith in digital formats. We have substantial fragments of the Bible on papyrus dating back 2000 years, and entire copies of many texts that aren't much younger. I'll be stunned if I look back from heaven (or, um, wherever) in 2000 years and see that ANYBODY still has a "computer" storing "jpegs." Forget 2000. I'll be stunned if I'm storing my own files in 20 years the way I'm storing them now.

So, finally, I try to get the best photos into print. I try to put together a photo book for my wife of the best family photos, once or twice a year. Nothing too fancy or too expensive. I make individual prints of the handful of my favorite shots, some for framing, some simply for safe keeping. If I were really scrupulous, I would make at least a small print of everything that I cared about more than just slightly. I don't do that yet but I keep thinking I'm going to start soon.


Will

[WMBP]

re: my raid & assumptions. kinda hilarious.

laptop: local backup (sync)
server: local source (active directory networked profile)
flickr: offsite backup of processed files

how is that not a valid backup strategy?

Well, here's the one great truth about backing up. Just as any exercise is better than no exercise, any backup strategy is better than no backup strategy. Yours is as good or better than most.

In the wonderful 2008 movie Ghost Town, dentist Ricky Gervais advises his patients to "only floss the ones you want to keep." Much the same could be said about backing up computer files.

as for operator faults, that's pretty ridiculous. why would i randomly erase / screw things up?

You don't look young enough in your avatar - I assume that's you - to justify this comment. Or perhaps you've led a charmed life. Or perhaps I've misunderstood you and you were trying to make a joke.

The funny thing is "random erasure" tends to happen mainly to expert users, or perhaps more precisely, users who fancy themselves experts. Ordinary users are scared of the computer and don't trust it. It's users who think they're experts who try clever things, like moving files around among multiple hard disks and in the process getting confused about where the files actually end up and not realizing that they weren't where I expected them to be until I had deleted them from where they actually were. It's expert users who are in a hurry and don't READ the "do you really really want to delete this forever?" dialog, hitting the default "Nuke it!" button impatiently and realizing a split second later that was a hasty decision. I speak here from my many years as an expert user. These days, I'm no longer an expert, having graduated into the "sadder but wiser man" category.

Anyway, computer disaster with data loss is like prostate cancer for men: If you live long enough, it's going to happen to you.

Will

[Lowell Goudge]

I should add that, while I didn't start taking digital photos until 2000, I've been working with computers since about 1985. I have extensive experience with lost files and files not exactly lost but grown inaccessible due to changes in file formats. I've lost book manuscripts (well, one book MS). I've lost the digital versions of musical works, poems, letters, articles, and much more. I have very little faith in digital formats. We have substantial fragments of the Bible on papyrus dating back 2000 years, and entire copies of many texts that aren't much younger. I'll be stunned if I look back from heaven (or, um, wherever) in 2000 years and see that ANYBODY still has a "computer" storing "jpegs." Forget 2000. I'll be stunned if I'm storing my own files in 20 years the way I'm storing them now.

So, finally, I try to get the best photos into print. I try to put together a photo book for my wife of the best family photos, once or twice a year. Nothing too fancy or too expensive. I make individual prints of the handful of my favorite shots, some for framing, some simply for safe keeping. If I were really scrupulous, I would make at least a small print of everything that I cared about more than just slightly. I don't do that yet but I keep thinking I'm going to start soon.


Will

this is my big worry, obsoleting file formats,

I know in the UK this happened with a ton of government records. they spent a lot of time archiving things only to find th ecomputer system went obsolete and the new one could not read the data

[mmayer]

My backup system:

1. External hard drive backup which is kept at home. backup files (about once a month)
2. Burned DVD's backup of all photos (.dng's and .jpg's), keep in a fireproof safe (annually)
3. Burned DVD's backup of all photos (.dng's and .jpg's), keep in my office at work (annually)
4. Uploaded copies of all .jpg's to Shutterly (as the .dng's are processed to jpg's)
5. Uploaded copies of all .jpg's to my Smugmug account (as the .dng's are processed to jpg's)

All this, and somehow I am not satisfied that I am doing enough! I think I'll start burning DVD's a bit more frequently.