Learned the hard way

[MatthewWilliams]

I bought a 1t external drive to store photos and music - my advice buy 2 and back the first one up -- long story short i was able to recover 96,133 files off the first drive ... just a thought

[AB26]

Matthew,

My sun in law advised me to rather use 4x 250GB HD’s rather than a single TB drive.
The reason: you know why!

[Manfred M]

Which is why I store all my files locally as well as on an external RAID box. The most important files have a third layer of redundancy (either a second RAID box in a different part of the house) or some in the "cloud". I have had hard drives fail in the RAID array, but swap out the defective drives and let the system rebuild redundancy, and I was back in business.

[Mike Buckley]

My second backup lives offsite in my wife's office except for the one evening each week that she brings it home for us to add that week's backup. If we have an unusual amount of changes to our files, she brings it home earlier than usual and returns it to her office the next day.

[DanK]

It's the principle that matters: back up. How one backs up is mostly a matter of convenience and taste, but backing up is essential.

I use two backups for photos. The first, which is very fast, is an external hard drive. I generally back up to this as soon as I have downloaded from the camera and culled from a shoot, and if I am not going to cull immediately, I back up as soon as I download. The second is Crashplan, which chugs along in the background for $49/year. The second is the same idea as Mike's: if you want to be really safe, you should have a backup offsite.

[tclune]

It's the principle that matters: back up. How one backs up is mostly a matter of convenience and taste, but backing up is essential.

Alternatively, one can avoid taking any photographs that would be missed if lost -- a principle that I have followed scrupulously for many, many years...

[Nicks Pics]

Another alternative is floppy discs.

No, I think backing up some of your photos securely is a good idea, but the line between ones worth backing up and not is non-existent

[Manfred M]

Another alternative is floppy discs.

And that would be a big NO. A floppy had a capacity of 1.44MB, and a RAW file out of my camera is 36MB, which means I would need 25 floppies to store just one image. I suspect you mean burn a DVD; again not a good idea as the regular ones you burn yourself are NOT meant for archival storage; I've had data loss in as little as 9 months on this type of storage device.

There are archival DVD / Blu-Ray disks available, some use regular burners and others need specialized ones. In my experience, not a process I would want to use; just too much manual work involved and they really are not all that cost effective. RAID disks are probably the best option currently out there.

[LocalHero1953]

A fair amount of my working life was looking at risks and how to manage them. This thread has prompted me to think of the risks of photographic data loss that need to be managed:
- no house of mine or of anyone else I know has ever burned down.
- we have been burgled 3 times in about 40 years (and one of these was in the Far East), but not since we fitted an intruder alarm. Obvious portable valuables were taken, including hifi kit and jewellery. I guess an easily found free-standing hard drive might be vulnerable.
- I have had two catastrophic hard disk failures at home in 25 years, but only the first resulted in loss of data, as I then learned the value of backups. Just from anecdotal discussions like this, I get the impression that RAID disks are more likely to fail than others - is that true?
- I've had a few viruses, all of which have been caught before they did harm.
- I have had LOTS of software failures of one sort or another that have required rebuilding data files from backups, sometimes with loss of data that hadn't been backed up recently.

My conclusion from this is that backups are vital, as is easy restoration (rebuilding a PC's software and data contents from scratch can take a long time). Keeping backups off site may not reduce real risks that much unless you're particularly vulnerable to fire or burglary, but I wonder about the value of RAID systems: for example, a faulty PSU, spiky mains supply or exposure to virus threats is common to all the disks in a RAID system. Perhaps separate drives would be better. I've never used a RAID system, so my concerns may be misplaced.

Are there other risks I haven't mentioned?

[Mike Buckley]

Are there other risks I haven't mentioned?

Depending on where one lives, earthquakes, terrorist bombings, and water damage from floods, hurricanes, tree falling on the house, etc, are worth considering.

no house of mine or of anyone else I know has ever burned down

A house doesn't have to burn down to pose risk to data. A fire confined to one room can do that damage. Even so, I do know two people whose houses completely burned to the ground and the business I was in for years occasionally required me to go to homes that had been seriously damaged by fire.

[dabhand]

............, but I wonder about the value of RAID systems: for example, a faulty PSU, spiky mains supply or exposure to virus threats is common to all the disks in a RAID system. Perhaps separate drives would be better. I've never used a RAID system, so my concerns may be misplaced.

Paul,

then wonder no longer ;-) the market leader in small/home office RAID devices plus others actually use the ext4 file system which is the default file system of many linux implementations - should the hardware of a RAID enclosure fail, data recovery is quite simple using a linux live disk. With respect to the drives, it's generally the controller which goes first and at least one of the drives survives.

At the moment I think the biggest threats to all home installations is the User who is careless, especially in what sites they visit and end up installing cyrptolocker; and all those commercial organisations whose security is so lax that loads of logins/passwords get stolen.

steve

[NorthernFocus]

Similar to Paul, I've spent a good bit of my professional life doing risk analysis, mitigation, etc. Most times it is a highly subjective topic. By definition, risk = probability x consequence. In the context of this discussion, evaluating consequence is an individual decision we must each make based on our perceived value of our photos/files. Probability is more easily quantified but in my experience most ignored. When evaluating probability, most people fall into one of two camps. Camp 1: It has never happened to me personally therefore it never will, or Camp 2: if it has ever happened to me once in life or to anyone that I know personally or if I've ever even heard of such a thing, then I'll move heaven and earth to make sure it never happens to me... ever.

After one does evaluate the risk, the question is, what to do about it? Which forces the decision of how much it is worth to you to mitigate the risk. In this discussion, the relevant cost really boils down to how much time/effort one is willing to commit. Considering the cost in equipment, time, travel, etc. that most of us have invested in our photos, the price of external HD backups is inconcequential. So it really boils down to "what are you prepared to do"(imagine Sean Connery accent).

Assuming one has made the commitment to backup with redundant copies, whether or not to store one copy in a separate location is pretty much a nonsensical discussion. Doing so is virtually free of additional cost, both time and money, relative to what has already been expended to that point. Just do it.

One question I have for those who do "back up". How many actually run some sort of backup software versus simply copying the folders containing photo files to an external drive?

[Mike Buckley]

Camp 1: It has never happened to me personally therefore it never will

My variation on that: It has never happened to me personally, so every day that I live without it happening means that I'm that much closer to it happening.

How many actually run some sort of backup software

I use backup software. Trying to manually keep track of which files have been changed, especially the cataloging changes I make to image files and corresponding sidecar files from time to time, would be incredibly tedious, time-consuming and ineffective. Using backup software to automatically detect all changed files is both extremely quick and highly effective.

[LocalHero1953]

Having recently retired, I no longer have an office as a useful backup location, so an alternative storage location which I can easily access frequently is not obvious. I'll have to do some thinking.

I use Microsoft's SyncToy, which easily tracks what has been changed, but is not "real" back up software and does no validation and overwrites changed files. I found backup software to be very slow when used properly, while SyncToy is as quick as copying.

I guess I fall into another of Dan's camps: Camp 3 - if it is quick and easy I'll do it, if not I won't, however rigorous it is!

[Mike Buckley]

Paul,

Consider SyncBack software. I use the free version and it's very fast. The paid version will not overwrite changed files and I don't know if that extra capability affects speed.

[Slipper]

I learned the hard way too, lost some years worth of music files, did back them up but not correctly.
I use two 500Gb ordinary external drives now and back up with Syncback free., It does back up new files, but must check if it backs up just on date change but same file name.

[NorthernFocus]

...I guess I fall into another of Dan's camps: Camp 3 - if it is quick and easy I'll do it, if not I won't, however rigorous it is!

I'm surprised we haven't run into one another. I've lived in that camp most of my adult life

I simply keep one of my backup copies in my car. That works for summer when I park outside. In winter I've historically kept a copy in my office at work. I'll need a new strategy before too long as I plan to join the ranks of the unemployed.

When my files were few enough I simply kept them all in a single master location with subfolders. Backup was to simply copy the whole parent folder. I kept a rolling set of about half a dozen copies. Now the volume it too large and I simply use the backup software that comes installed on the Passport external drive. Not totally comforable doing so but that's the current plan.

[LocalHero1953]

At first look the free version of Syncback behaves the same way as SyncToy, overwriting changed files and doing no validation. Both the latter have downsides: slow recovery in the first case, and slow backup in the second. The ease of use of SyncToy means that I use it often and for multiple backups - two separate external drives, neither permanently connected (to minimise malware risk) and one not powered up (to avoid power spikes). I back up images every time I load them from the camera and after each major editing session - it takes little time.

I wrote lightly about being in the "if it's easy I'll do it" camp, but we are all human, and if things are slow or difficult then there is a tendency to do them less frequently - and I'm definitely in the human camp

[Nicks Pics]

And that would be a big NO. A floppy had a capacity of 1.44MB, and a RAW file out of my camera is 36MB, which means I would need 25 floppies to store just one image. I suspect you mean burn a DVD; again not a good idea s the regular ones you burn yourself are NOT meant for archival storage; I've had data loss in as little as 9 months on this type of storage device. a

Well there you go, get a couple dozen floppies and you've backed up your file

I'm not trying to give the impression of a dunce, it was meant to be a joke, but I may not have made that clear. All in fun.

My plan is to keep all my files on my WD Passport 1T external hard drive, and then copy ones that I have thought worth taking the time to process onto my computer's storage. This is not a fail proof plan, but neither is it expensive or impractical for one that doesn't have a huge number of quality files and is not at a serious risk over it if they were lost. Perhaps someone who has put more years into their work or relies on their photos for income would want to take further measures for prevention.

[NorthernFocus]

Well there you go, get a couple dozen floppies and you've backed up your file

I'm not trying to give the impression of a dunce, it was meant to be a joke...

That was my first assumption. Then I thought maybe it was a slip and you meant DVD disk and that was enough storage for you. So I decided to remain uncharacteristically silent

I suspect there are those who would argue that all of my images worth protecting would fit on a floppy disc